Market leader AW Jenkinson Forest Products gets DISAB CompVac in to clean up

One of the UK’s leading wood processing and recycling companies, A. W. Jenkinson Forest Products, has been trialling the DISAB CompVac in its mill near Penrith, Cumbria. The results have impressed the management team sufficiently to consider purchasing a DISAB industrial vacuum cleaning machine of their own.

Meeting and surpassing H&S inspections, turning problems into solutions
A.W. Jenkinson Forest Products operates environmentally responsible processing facilities for supplying hundreds of tonnes of bagged sawdust and shavings to regional agricultural and equestrian businesses. Roger Balmer is the company’s General Manager and his responsibilities include ensuring all the monthly H&S inspections are met and surpassed. He decided to give the CompVac a trial in the buildings housing all the processing machinery and equipment that produces various grades of sawdust and shavings.

As Roger explains: “The process generates a lot of dust that gets airborne as well as around the plant itself. This means we need to remove all that wood dust build up, including from the perlings at high level as well as all the lower level nooks and crannies where dust builds up.”
“These places can be virtually inaccessible when your operatives have to use brooms and brushes, and using air hoses to knock down the dust build up from girders and beams etc. only makes for even more back breaking work, besides being a very inefficient way of removing and collecting all the wood dust.”

“The importance of doing this work is both to ensure a safer working environment and, because all that wood dust has a value, we can recycle it all. So a solution that offered to make it much easier, safer and faster to remove the dust completely from any part of the plant, gather it all safely into a hopper, which any of our operatives can safely empty back in to the process again, and which saves us a lot of time over the previous methods, was something we were keen to trial and evaluate.”

Results: an efficient waste removal solution delivered as promised
The net results were very straightforward, as Roger explained: “The CompVac worked out very well. It was used daily for a month and the hopper was typically filled four or five times each day, which equated to about a tonne per day.”

The CompVac demonstrated a number of the famed DISAB virtues such as:

• ease of operation as the operatives found it was a no-hassle machine to use with more than enough suction power at the end of its 60’ flexible suction hose.
• reliability as it worked every time every day without complaint.
• portability, an essential benefit that required simply a forklift to lift and take the CompVac to wherever it was required on site.

With the 60’ flexible suction hose and the standard accessories of an extension pipe and cleaning heads, getting to any of the awkward places in, under, above or around machinery was much easier and safer as well.

‘…a very good piece of kit’
So with the trial completed, what did Roger think of the advice given by the DISAB UK Sales Engineer, Dave Mills?

“Fine, accurate and everything he said the CompVac would do, it did, and moving it around with the forklift was simplicity itself. It’s proved itself to be a very good piece of kit, and that’s why we’re looking at getting one of our own.”

“The CompVac worked out very well and did everything DISAB said it would do.”

For more info call 01737 246 649, visit www.disab.com or see us at Hillhead 2016, Stand C12.