Houtwerk in Beverwijk is a specialist in the production of custom kitchens, furniture and interiors. Their are active in the mid- and high-end segment of the market, but at the same time they always succeed to meet the customers budget for the given project. The customer's wishes and ideas are the starting point - the essence of custom projects.
Houtwerk employs 25 experienced woodworkers and they have an impressive collection of wood processing machines installed at their facilities. Amongst the advanced machinery is a 5-axes CNC controlled routing and cutting machine.
Management from left to right: Diewert van der Horst, Niels van der Ent Braat en Jaga Hoving.
Noise
Extraction of wood dust has always been an issue, says director and co-owner Diewert van der Horst: "Employees are reluctant to close the manual sliding dampers, and we have issues with pneumatic sliding dampers that get stuck and stop working. At the same time, when dampers are left open, they produce a lot of noise for the nearby workers."
Dust collector with multiple motors
Houtwerk has an enormous dust collector/filter unit with multiple fans/motors installed outside the facilities. Depending on a minimum level of (under) pressure the unit will switch on additional motors. In other words, as soon as multiple sliding dampers are opened in the ducting, the under pressure will drop and additional motors will be switched on causing a steep increase in energy consumption.
Van der Horst: "When I realized that every manual sliding dampers that is left open while the wood processing machine is not in use leads to an increase in energy consumption, I started to close dampers on a daily basis each time in walked into our facilities..."
New SHUTR automated sliding dampers
Houtwerk installed several fully automated electric sliding dampers of BlastGate.com and Van der Horst shares his experiences: "Since we started using the SHUTR Gates and Sensors we have no more inlets open at unused machines. This will lead for sure to less energy consumption of the dust collector although it is hard to say how much that is. We will know when we look at our electricity bill on a longer term. Our workers find the automated dampers a blessing: no more opening and closing dampers by hand all day long and above all, less noise on the workfloor...!"
Sensor on CNC controlled router
Another improvement is the dust extraction of one of the CNC controlled routers. In the past the worker would have to open and close the sliding dampers with a chain by hand and it was left open most of the time. Now the inlet is automatically opened with a SHUTR Gate in combination with a smart SHUTR Sensor.
The Sensor, clamped on to the power cable of the CNC router, is tuned in such a way that it will only activate the electric sliding damper when the spindle starts turning. With an additional shut-off delay the damper remains open when the router is performing a short tool change.