Air Cleaners Are they effective

[Jack01]

I am thinking of getting a Air Cleaner for my Basement Shop 
It is about 290 Sq Ft.
It is sound proof and air tight so the dust does not get to other part of the basement when the door is closed.
I have dust collector and festool vacuum so most of the dust get captured, but I still see some dust on tool surfaces and shelves.

Will the air cleaner be effective to capture the escaped dust and keep the shop relatively clean?

[fredhargis]

I think so, I ran one just to clean the air before any finishing I did. Reduced (but did not eliminate) the dust nibs a lot. So I guess i think it will keep your shop cleaner, but not squeaky clean.

[vernonator]

I think so - I run mine the entire time I am in the shop. I am in the Basement and about 240sq ft with the majority of the basement finished. There is never any dust outside the shop, and the dust that collects on surfaces is VERY minimal.

[ajkoontz]

I am thinking of getting a Air Cleaner for my Basement Shop 
It is about 290 Sq Ft.
It is sound proof and air tight so the dust does not get to other part of the basement when the door is closed.
I have dust collector and festool vacuum so most of the dust get captured, but I still see some dust on tool surfaces and shelves.

Will the air cleaner be effective to capture the escaped dust and keep the shop relatively clean?

I work in an attached 2 car garage (very drafty), and I still get a lot of dust landing on surfaces even with a Jet air filter. But, there is always a lot of dust caught in the filter so it must be doing something. In other words, they work but they're not an end all be all solution. If mine ever goes down, I'll replace it.

[Phil Thien]

Yes, they work.  If you have the space and money, they can be a very helpful addition to a shop.

If your dust collector has a good filter, leaving that running with a gate or two open can work equally well with a caveat:  A cartridge filter on a DC may be more difficult to maintain and more expensive to replace, compared to an ambient air cleaner filter.  If you go look at the Woodgears.ca website, you'll see he learned his larger DC (with bag filter) was doing an amazing job cleaning the air.

And all that said, it is far easier to add dust to the air, than remove it.  So one shouldn't stop after hanging an ambient air cleaner and consider the job done.  Equally important is making sure you're doing the best you can, within your limits, to prevent dust from escaping machining operations.

If your climate allows, a simple exhaust fan does great, as well.  And is really the best option when it comes to things like spraying finishes.

[FS7]

If you're referring to the ceiling hangers that are all apparently made by the exact same factory in China, yes, they do work. I bought a Wen a while ago just hoping to eliminate some of the dust that was collecting on the surfaces. Shop cleaning used to require a solid half hour of vacuuming to get all of that off, but now quite a bit of it is captured. I keep it above the table saw and planer, and while both are connected to the dust collector the filters still get VERY dirty. That's the easiest way to see that it's working.

I also basically run mine the entire time I'm in the shop. For the cost, they seem to be quite effective.

[MarkSingleton]

You can catch a surprising amount of dust with a simple box fan
with a furnace filter taped to it.   Really.

I have a ceiling unit. It works very well. But after watching a few
YouTube videos about box fan/filters it seemed pretty easy to
test.  Now I run both.

Plus the DC.   Plus wear a good mask.

[sailer5373]

Izzy Swan put a video on You Tube, and greatly touted the air cleaning effectiveness of a plain old box fan with a furnace filter bungeed to it.  He compared it statistically with the more expensive commercial one you buy and showed the the box fan was more effective.  Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCEPNFFpy8

[Phil Thien]

You can catch a surprising amount of dust with a simple box fan
with a furnace filter taped to it.   Really.

I have a ceiling unit. It works very well. But after watching a few
YouTube videos about box fan/filters it seemed pretty easy to
test.  Now I run both.

Plus the DC.   Plus wear a good mask.

Well an additional benefit of running two is the improved air circulation.

If one were to setup four box fans with filters, one near each corner of a shop and aimed at the next corner, they could probably outperform many commercial air cleaners because they're doing to keep the air in their shop spinning, giving the filters the best opportunity to clean any dust.

[Lumber Yard®]

All good ideas here. I've used a few different set-ups over the years. I started with just a couple cheap box fans with filters strapped on and they do catch a lot of stuff. I purchased a JDS 750-ER 14022 3 Speed Air Filtration System years ago and it does a great job of catching stuff and circulating the air in the shop. I also, have a Grizzly 2HP cyclone functioning as my main machinery dust collector. Sometime after purchasing the Grizzly and the JDS, I purchased the Dylos air monitor that measures particles in the air. I don't have all the stats and details but I can tell you from memory the best performance was obviouly when both were running. IIRC I set things up by getting a bunch of dust in the air with a ROS and then ran the tests. I performed tests with both running and then with each of them running independent of each other. The surprising result was the Grizzly Cyclone left running independently with a couple machine blast gates open outperformed the JDS when it ran independently. IIRC the results were not really close. The Grizzly by itself would scrub the air in a few minutes while the JDS would get it done but it was maybe 5x as long to get it done.

Hopefully that makes sense.