WB Whites Foundry is a small privately owned foundry in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, manufacturing small to medium sized castings for the manufacturing and service industries in the UK.

The Company were looking for improvements to their extraction system for various reasons.

• The level of extraction was not as effective as it ought to be
• Power consumption was excessive
• Physically the filter plant was large, taking up valuable yard space

Extraction is from two areas, these being two fettling benches and a shot blast machine. The latter of these was required to run during a night shift meaning that the 45kW fan would have been running at a fraction of its duty with resulting excessive energy consumption, out of proportion with the work being done.

Heaton Green Dust Control’s solution was to split the extraction into two dedicated systems these being the fettling bench extraction and the shot blast machine, each system being served by a cartridge filter. The fan sizes for each new system is 15kW and 7.5kW respectively giving a total power requirement of 22.5kW, a half of the existing plant. The savings on running costs for daytime running is obviously very good and given that the night shift usage of the shot blast machine only requires 7.5kW, overall power savings are considerable.

Although power consumption is a major consideration, WB Whites now have much improved extraction, providing a better working environment for their employees with two systems designed to current standards meeting the requirement of COSHH and the complimenting Factory Inspector’s guideline HSG258.