November/December 2009 - Making sure his workers have a healthy and clean working environment is important to Joe Waldner, president of WS Machining & Fabrication Inc., Steinbach, Manitoba.

But he gains additional benefits when he makes sure the air in his plants meets or exceeds standards set by the provincial government. He gains greater employee productivity, large savings in heating and cooling costs, and a clean, upscale facility that customers and potential clients are impressed with and want to use.

"We’ve been in business 20 years and have from 120 to 150 employees in three facilities that cover about 100,000 sq. ft.," says Waldner. "We build a lot of manufactured components for the agriculture industry. These are what I would call second-tier parts or components. Typically, the thickness of the material that we use is heavy, such as steel that ranges from 12 gauge to 1-in.-thick plate. We’re a total manufacturing solution. With the types of equipment we have, we can cut the material, form it, weld it, paint or powder coat it, assemble it and even drop-ship a finished product to the final customer."

Because of the company’s northern location, winter temperatures can drop to -40 C. With all of the welding done inside the facility, which can create a lot of smoke, WS had problems keeping the air clean. The company also didn’t want to move the air outside because of the cost of heating incoming replacement air.

Waldner was also concerned about his employees’ health. "We’re in a fast-growing area of North America," he says. "We haven’t felt the recession like the United States has, so retention of employees is always an issue for us. Workers don’t want to work in a facility that has air-quality problems. For us, using an air recirculation and filtration system is the only way to keep air clean without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in reheating it by moving the air outside and bringing fresh air in."

Adding capacity
WS purchased an SFC 24-3 clean-air system from United Air Specialists Inc., Cincinnati, to clean the air from its welding stations, which solved the issues of reheating air and keeping the plant clean for employees.

"In fact, we just purchased another system from United Air Specialists that’s much bigger than what we have," says Waldner. "Currently, we clean about 15,000 cfm. But our business has grown about 500 percent since we purchased the first system, so we bought a model SFC 64-4 from United Air Specialists, which has five times the capacity. Now we can take air filtration to the next level and capture smoke right at a source, take it out, clean it and bring it back in.

"We have people ask us all the time as to how we keep our air clean," he says. "We show them our system and recommend United Air Specialists." FFJ