It doesn’t look like the dust collection is kicking on automatically for the planer/router area. We emptied the trash today and pulled tons of sawdust out of the planer hose. The hose gates are coming on but the vacuum itself isn’t kicking in.
There’s problems with the blast gates being set incorrectly. The gates and switches put the switches where they’re very exposed to the user and easy to change, either intentionally, or people may be bumping them. I’d like to know which.
All power-cord sensors and blast gates must be set to AUTO (as well as the dust collector power switch). I would like to see covers over these switches, or just something to keep them from being configured incorrectly. I’ve found them incorrect about half the times I’ve checked.
One quirk of the iVac system is that for some of these components, AUTO is on the left, but center on others.
Yes, the were mostly all set to Open instead of Auto yesterday. When we went through and reset all the gates and got the vacuum on there still was not enough suction to make a difference on the planer.
The system has plenty of suction for the planer or any 2 tools, except the shared single-hose routing past the table saw is too much restriction for the flow of multiple tools so when something in the planer area while combined with the table saw at the same time it does weaken flow for both.
If, by itself, the planer is not getting sufficient airflow, then the two likely candidates are a clog in the planer plenum or the hose, or the dust collector’s cannister dust filter is clogged again resulting in poor flow across the system.
There is a sensor on the power cable for each device. Those must also be set to AUTO. Also, if the power to the sensor is accidentally pulled out, then of course it will neither turn on the dust collector nor move the blast gate slide to the OPEN postition. We have seen one of these sensors malfunction BTW and it was unable to communicate with either.
There are DIP switches inside all 3 types of components- the blast gates, tool cord sensor, and dust collector motor switch. This is how it knows which blast gate to turn on when the drum sander is used. They all have unique IDs and I have labeled every sensor and every gate with the programmed ID so there is no confusion.
Though unlikely, someone may have pulled off the rubber dust stopper and poke around trying in vain to correct a nonexistent config problem, and instead created a config problem.