Laserfilter

The laser cutters @ Bitraf have one filter each:

• The small Redsail X700 (50x70cm cutting area @ 60W) uses the "Bofa AD Oracle IQ"
• The larger Redsail X900 (70x90cm cutting area @ 110W) uses a "Bofa AD1000 IQ"

It's not feasible to let one filter run more than one machine due to the volume of air that you need to pull through. Swapping the filters are as easy as opening the lock, turning a handle and pulling out the old filter. Just do it in reverse to add the new one.

The smaller was purchased from Alvøen. The larger from Vodex in the UK. The UK price is about half the Norwegian price, so certainly worth checking out.

Maintenance

From FAQ section on BOFA web "All local exhaust ventilation (LEV) systems should be thoroughly examined and tested by a qualified engineer at least every 14 months - some process may mean that your unit requires much more frequent servicing."

Building your own

Before buying commercial filter unit, we tried building our own filter. This is really hard as you need to force a lot of air through at least a coal filter + a particle filter of som sort. For large machines, you need a very powerful fan to force air through these. You also need to consider that getting hold of new filters must be quite easy also. It's much, much easier to keep tools in a working state if more than one person can help. Calling a supplier rather than running around thttps://bofainternational.com/own to source required parts only pays off if you have a very low hourly rate and not much else to do...

After giving up on our own filter, we just ventilated into the backyard. Blowing out a large volume of heated air really does something to your heating costs, but the reason we had to get a filter was that the neighbours complained when we were cutting plastics.