As your factory expands and your company begins to manufacture more items, you need to constantly re-evaluate the facility's safety and health capacity. A new piece of equipment might release new substances into the air, or increased use of current equipment could create other issues that weren't really a problem with occasional use. While your facility's HVAC system is no doubt in good shape — and very powerful — it is not enough when you have machinery that creates other air and environmental hazards. Air filtration in industrial settings requires a much different setup, especially when dealing with oil mist and industrial dust.

Your HVAC System Can't Handle Oil Mist and Industrial Dust

Technically, any air filter that has the capacity to catch airborne particles of a certain diameter will catch those particles no matter what substance those particles may be made of. However, the filters you find in your HVAC system can fill up and degrade, allowing particles through, so they can spread to other parts of the facility. Plus, HVAC filters may not be able to catch smaller particles released in industrial settings. The last thing you want is to have oil mist or industrial dust spreading throughout the factory where they could affect all your employees.

Control Requires Different Filter Locations

It's better to have specialized filters located at the machinery producing the problematic substances. For things like mist and dust, you typically have a couple of layers of filtration, one to catch the particles as they're released from the equipment, and then a second layer of filters elsewhere in the room. Those are in addition to the main HVAC vents; the filters prevent those particles from getting into the main vent system.

Less Is Not More Here

Being efficient and reducing the equipment you have to the bare minimum actually doesn't work in this case. You should have as much filtration as is necessary to keep everyone healthy, and it has to be maintained and replaced on schedule. This is one aspect of expansion that you really need to go all out on instead of looking for excessive cost-saving measures.

A company that focuses on industrial and commercial air and filtration systems will be able to create a system for you that traps those unwanted particles and prevents them from drifting into the main HVAC system in the building. They'll know which filters work best for which substances and what each manufacturer requires.