Opinion on sanitary tee to handle the vertical?

[mikeyl]

I just finished running the circuit for the cyclone. I’m waiting on an electrical box and my exhaust adapter to get things up and running. I will be using the contactor with a 120 iVac remote control switch. I have a friend working on a design for automated blast gates using Arduino. I followed advice I read on one of the forums and obtained 6” schedule 20 pvc pipes from Ace hardware. That was awesome. What wasn’t awesome was trying to find the schedule 20 pipe fittings. I ordered all the fittings from amazon before I realized the impact of the schedule 20. If you don’t know, the 6” fittings are significantly different in sizing from schedule 20 to 40. I special ordered the fittings from an irrigation supply store. When they finally came in, I nearly choked on the price.

So that brings me to my main concern: Now that I’ve purchased all of the fittings for the second time, (the one’s I bought this time fit the pipe). But… for all 3 of the vertical transitions (6” down to the clearvue 6” to dual 4” fittings), I decided to use SANITARY TEE’S. Did I screw up (again?)?! It seemed to me that the sanitary tee would provide a curved transition back to the cyclone that seemed to me the most logical way to hit the vertical. I only have two branches, with 3 vertical runs down, each to the 6”/4” plenum. That’s 6 total hookups. The clearvue is probably overkill for where my shop is now. I have a Shop Fox W1851 hybrid table saw, Grizzly 6” x 80” edge sander, W1706 band saw, Jet 16/32 drum sander, a 20” x 40” downdraft table with a 4” port. The remaining port, I will use for a small cnc mill, or various belt and spindle sanders, or a big gulp dust hood.

So, do I need to get these sanitary tee’s back to the irrigation supply and go with a wye and 45?

 

[Curly1]

I believe you should go ahead and use the sanitary tees you have for a couple reasons. First is the 4" ducts to and at the machines will restrict the airflow give or take to about 400 cfm so a less than ideal flow of air at that Tee isn't going to have an impact. You'll need to have another port open to get flow to make the cyclone separate properly also. Second reason is that two 45° degree fittings have about the same drag as 90° fitting depending on the radii of the fittings. A tee alone should be no worse than a wye plus a 45° installation. Look at page 54 of http://www.lorencook.com/PDFs/Catalo...ok_Catalog.pdf and you can see the 1R 90° Smooth has the equivalent length of a piece of straight pipe 25' long. The 45° 3 piece (closest they show to smooth) has the equivalent of 15' so a pair would be 30'. So even if the Tee is a .75R fitting it isn't going to be a lot worse than the 45°s.

Pete

 

[mikeyl]

Thank you, Curly. I appreciate you weighing in. I may have found a source for the wye’s, but I’m going to go ahead with what I have for now. Especially if they work out to about the same with a 45. I haven’t done much looking into expanding the size of the tool ports, mostly because this dust collection bit has turned into a major project in its own rite. Maybe once I get settled in to where I can start making stuff again, one of these days, I’ll tackle that aspect of it.