I Already Have Air Cleaners, Why Is There Still a Haze in the Air?
When we’re out serving our customers in industrial manufacturing facilities, we are often asked, “I already have air cleaners. Why is there still a haze in the air?” The answer usually comes down to three key factors that you can evaluate in your facility to improve the air quality for both your equipment and your employees.
Factor #1: Particle Size
Manufacturing processes produce particles of many different sizes. Larger particles can often be seen with the naked eye, while submicron particles are invisible and can only be measured with specialized particle counters. The smoke or haze you see in the air is made up of a wide range of particle sizes.
The smallest particles can remain suspended in the air for hours or even days before settling, creating challenges for both employee health and indoor air quality. Even with a source capture system, some of these fine particles may escape during the manufacturing process without being noticed by the operator.
This is especially common in facilities that operate CNC machines, tool grinders, and cold formers. If you already have a source capture air cleaning system in place, checking that you have the proper extraction rate (CFM) from each machine can lead to finding the problem machines. Most air cleaners reduce air flow over time due to the plugging of filters or from the fan becoming less effective due to dirt on its blades. Ensuring your filter systems are running as designed through regular CFM checks and filter changes as needed can eliminate this issue. If your machines are hard to fully enclose, adding an ambient (free-air) electrostatic air cleaner is often an effective solution for capturing the fine particles that create the haze throughout the facility. Bee Clean Specialties provides regular service checkups, including CFM checks and stocking and replacing filters as needed.
Factor #2: Air Cleaner Efficiency
The efficiency of your air cleaner is another important factor. A properly sized and maintained air cleaning system should achieve over 90% collection efficiency.
At Bee Clean Specialties, we service electrostatic air cleaners from leading manufacturers, including SmogHog®, MistBuster®, Tri-Mist®, Trion®, Aerocology®, Smokeeter®, and many other industry brands. Properly maintained double pass electrostatic air cleaners can achieve collection efficiencies above 99% on many applications.
If your facility uses media air cleaners, the MERV rating of the filter plays a major role in filtration efficiency. For example, a MERV 16 filter can capture approximately 95% of airborne particles under standard testing conditions.
Whether your facility uses electrostatic or media filtration, regular inspection and maintenance is essential to keep the equipment operating at peak efficiency.
Factor #3: Machine Load
The amount of smoke generated by your manufacturing process depends on the materials being processed and the type of operation being performed. If production generates more smoke than the air cleaning system was designed to handle, both electrostatic and media air cleaners can become overloaded.
When this happens, collection efficiency drops, and smoke may begin passing through the unit instead of being captured. Unlike the fine haze discussed earlier, this problem is usually easy to identify because the smoke is visible. If the overload is temporary, the particles will often settle within a few hours. However, if it becomes a recurring issue, it may be time to increase your air cleaning capacity or upgrade your existing system. With media filters, the problem is noticed that the smoke is not pulled from the machines quickly enough, causing it to blow into the operator’s face when opening the enclosures. Bee Clean Specialties can provide regular checks on Absolents, Plymovents, Torits, and other media filters to inform you ahead of the problem and take care of the filter changes as needed as well. Bee Clean helps you to prevent issues that let the smoke affect your team and production.
Improving Your Facility’s Air Quality
With more than 48 years of experience, Bee Clean Specialties has helped industrial manufacturers improve indoor air quality by evaluating existing air cleaning systems and recommending practical, cost-effective solutions. Whether you operate SmogHog®, MistBuster®, Tri-Mist®, Trion®, Aerocology®, Smokeeter®, or other commercial air-cleaning equipment, our experienced technicians can help you maximize system performance.