Whether it’s collecting heavy dust, fine dust, odours or vapour mist – what filter will achieve optimum performance?
1st May 2025
Whether work on your project creates heavy dust, fine dust, odours or vapour mist, you’ll need the right filter to ensure optimum performance of your engineering controls and worker safety on-site.
Uncontrolled dust and fumes are governed by the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, The Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002 and the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002. These regulations are in place to protect teams like yours from hazardous exposure and the pressure doesn’t end with finding any solution, it ends with finding the right solution.
You need to make sure that engineering controls implemented on site are effective for the task at hand. Using an extraction unit with incorrect, blocked or inefficient filters can end up creating more complications on site than it solves, so understanding filter best practice has never been more important.
Designed to trap heavy particulates such as particles created from cement dust and wood cutting. A medium grade filter like this is also 80% effective at removing smaller particulate matter down to 1 micron in size (PM1 - 1 μm) including some finer dust particles, industrial fumes, and bacteria spores.
They are often used as a pre-filter to remove the bulk of larger dust particles and protect the finer filters from being blinded by heavy dust loading during the extraction process. Without this, other filters would block and quickly become ineffective.
This type of filter media operates with three distinctive capture principles:
Good for visible dust removal and designed mainly for low-toxicity dusts or where the system is venting to a safe area.
Acts as a protective layer when using highly efficient filters up to HEPA standard.
The most efficient filter available on the market, designed to give virtually clean air. Welding fume, burning fume, smoke and even airborne bacteria such as COVID can be caught with a filter of this efficiency.
To put the efficiency into perspective, HEPA filters an impressive 99.97% of 0.3-micrometer air particles, only 3 of every 10,000 particles make it through.
A particulate filter will not prevent gas from passing through it. Work that requires gas to be captured needs a filter with specific materials such as activated carbon. When gas passes across these filters, a chemical reaction causes the gas molecules to stick to the surface of the filter.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to filters because it largely depends on what work you’re carrying out, other works taking place nearby and many other factors that need consideration.
That said, we do know what the risks associated with specific dust and fume exposure are, as laid out in the following whitepapers:
This list is not extensive and if you are exposed to dust or fumes which cannot be eliminated or substituted, you should seek advice on engineering controls to manage them. At RVT Group, we work closely with our customers to understand the job at hand and provide a tailored advice.
If you decide to use RVT Group for your temporary hire solution, you can rest assured that any filters you get are brand new and will be the winning-combination you need to capture the hazards specific to your team’s work.
For an initial consultation and specialist advice that works best for you, contact us on 0808 281 3150 or complete this form >
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