In this episode of the OnAire Podcast, we talk with Jonathan McPherson from Kansas State University’s Powder & Bulk Solids Lab about the real-world challenges of dust control in manufacturing.
You’ll learn:
- Why dust collection alone isn’t enough to stay safe and compliant
- How fugitive dust threatens air quality, safety, and uptime
- The power of Dynamic Particle Control (DPC) and SonicAire’s role in automating housekeeping
- What education and research labs are doing to close the skills gap in bulk solids handling
- The unexpected ways dust control improves employee morale and plant performance
🛠️ Whether you manage operations, safety, or maintenance, this episode helps you understand the true cost of dust—and how to fix it for good.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome back to another awesome episode of the OnAire podcast. We just finished meeting with our guest Jonathan McPherson from K-State University in their powder and bulk solids lab.
Oh yeah. It’s been really cool getting to know Jonathan over the last little bit.
Yeah, so let’s talk about that. So, you’ve been out there twice now?
Yep.
And spoken at their conference on…?
Dust collection fundamentals. Something like that.
But Taylor, we don’t collect dust.
We do not collect dust, which is really interesting that we get involved, and we’re lucky enough to do it. But we get to slide in on more of the housekeeping and safety side. So, it works out.
Even if you collect it, you’ve still got to housekeep it.
Yeah. I mean, get as much as you can, but you can’t get it all.
Hey, so I was actually doing some stuff in my garage last night. I’m not a woodworker, but I have a couple saws, so I guess I’m qualified to cut wood. And I just ripped a couple boards, and I had a five-gallon bucket full of sawdust. It was everywhere. Dust is everywhere. So, where good things happen, dust happens, too, I think.
Every time. You can never get away from it. Even at your house.
I’m telling you, man. But I work for a fan company that deals with dust, so I knew how to clean it up when I was done.
We should send one of the fans to your garage.
I would love that. Put it just right there. It would clear it out for sure. Alright, so we hope you enjoy this episode all about Jonathan and what he’s doing at K-State. They’re doing some awesome stuff out there. Just really changing the industry and working and partnering with people in the bulk handling space. And they have a lot of classes and curriculum on how to do better at what we’re doing. And so, Taylor’s been a part of that, and I know they are continually trying to innovate and create great content to help the world and help the industry. So check them out. So, without any further ado, here’s Jonathan McPherson.
We’re back, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for taking your time to hang out. I’m Taylor.
I’m Jordan.
And we’re back for another episode of the OnAire Podcast. And today we get the privilege of talking to somebody I’ve been able to develop a relationship with over the last little bit. My good friend Jonathan McPherson from Kansas State University. Welcome.
Thank you for having me on. Careful how you throw that word privilege around. But seriously, it’s a pleasure to be here and talk to you guys. Thank you very much.
Yeah, of course. We’re super excited to do this. And we’ll get into a little bit about how we ultimately got connected and what we’re working on with K-State and all about what you guys do. But why don’t you start and tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got where you’re at and what you do.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a little bit to get going there. So, who I am, let’s start with that as a person, right? So, engineering background, mechanical engineering tech, born and raised here in the state of Kansas, went to college at a tiny little college southeast corner of Kansas, met somebody at a career fair that talked to me about industrial equipment and it kind of threw me into this world of bulk material handling. And beyond that, father of two, I have a little girl on the way as well. I live here in the Kansas City area, and I’ve been working for K-State for a little over a year. We’ll call it about a year and a half, something like that.
Very cool. Little one on the way, congratulations.
Thank you.
Are you ready for going back to not really sleeping and being a zombie?
Yes and no. So, the no part of that is, our youngest is three coming up on four, and he’s at an age where it doesn’t matter what time you put him to bed, he will wake up when he’s ready. And so, my wife and I take turns because he’ll walk himself into our room at the crack of dawn and he’ll want to go play. We’re already lacking sleep at the moment, so I’m sure it will continue to decline.
That’s the best when they show up and they’re like right in your face. What is happening right now?
You just get that with teenagers now, though.
Yeah. No, it takes a grenade to wake them up. Yeah. That’s a different challenge. You’ll be there soon.
I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I can hear him coming down the stairs, and then I can hear the bedroom door. And I guess I’m just like trained to wake up to those sounds now, and every morning it’s like, here we go. We’ll see what kind of mood he’s in today.
Or how recently he brushed his teeth. Probably more like it.
Yeah, very true. Well, I’m trying to think what else I can tell you about me as a person. So, the other thing I love to tell people is I grew up with a little bit of a farming background. So, I actually went to high school here in the Kansas City area, but my parents, in the late 80s, bought about 140 acres. And so, I kind of grew up one foot here, one foot there. We’re actually technically tree farmers, which is funny. You don’t think about Kansas as being full of trees, but the part of Kansas that we’re in is very transitional. There is quite a bit. So anyway, I always like to share that because it’s kind of part of what made me who I am, and love welding and mechanics, and just getting outside and enjoying that kind of stuff.
Okay, we need to know more about what tree farming involves.
Yeah, and when you’re on a farm like that, you are the it. You have to fix everything.
Yeah, and it’s a blessing and a curse because I think I can fix everything. Generally I can, but as I’ve gotten older, it’s a tradeoff. You know, is it really worth trying to dive in and fix it? Do you need to take it somewhere else or whatever?
There are times I look at my wife and I go, can I just call somebody? Like, I know I can fix this, but I really don’t want to.
Yeah.
I’m with you.
I get the opposite a lot. Sarah’s like, why can’t you fix this?
You’re an engineer; fix it!
Let me tell you something. That is not my God given ability is to fix things. I’m quickly like, can we just pay somebody? I can figure it out. It’s probably not going to be great. I can’t hang doors. You know, that’s kind of a running joke at this point, but yeah, I’m the opposite. So how does one farm a tree?
So, for us, there was like a 10-acre piece of land that was in a floodplain, and my parents didn’t know what to do with it. And I don’t know if they were savvy enough to get ahold of Kansas Forestry Association, or exactly how they came up with the idea, but they decided to plant trees. And so, they did some research, and black walnut is a native tree. They grow really, really well in this area. And so, they started with, you know, little saplings like the size of a finger, probably smaller than that. They planted 1200 over the course of two years. And they went and they planted it. My dad built a big square out of two by fours, and they’re all planted on this 12 by 12 grid across this 10 acres. So, they did, I don’t know, 600 one summer and the remaining the remaining summer.
And shockingly, most of them lived. Like it’s actually to the point where they’ve lived and they thrive so well that my brother and I need to go back and start thinning some out, because the deal with that kind of wood is you want it to grow very straight, right? So, we need to go and start trimming out the ones that are crooked that aren’t worth as much for timber and so on and so forth. But what’s funny is my parents, they had a great idea, right? And they always said from the beginning, this will be our grandkids’ college fund. I don’t think they did enough research because it turns out the lifespan of a black walnut tree is like 80 years.
So, they planted them and like, I will be lucky to still be on this earth by the time those trees are cut. So, it’ll be like, I don’t know what generation of grandkids’ college fund at that point.
Long term investment. Long, long term investment.
It is crazy to think about that area though. I mean, we’re super green here. But most of the time when you hear tree farming or whatever, it’s like everything out in the Northwest or anything like that. That’s really cool though. Never would have expected that to come from Kansas.
Yeah, absolutely. But Timber’s a big part of where you guys are at, too. You and I have talked in the past, and you had a role in a…it wasn’t even a wood shop. It was a full-blown factory, right?
Oh yeah, my wood stacking summer. We were bringing in most everything. So, they weren’t taking it from timber to finished flooring or anything. We would give the stack of unfinished flooring. They would finish it. And it was my job to unstack the front pallet and then run to the other side of the line and restack the finished pallet. So, needless to say, I had a great summer.
Kept you motivated to stay in school, didn’t it?
Yeah, that was kind of the thing I heard every day from all of those workers there. Lots of interesting little stories from them. Not really the place to share those, but interesting. So, quite the crew there. They still haven’t bought any fans. I did reach out to them. But anyways, can you tell us a little bit about, now that you’re at K-State, what program you’re involved in, and then you guys have the labs going on. Can you just tell us about what you’re doing there?
Sure, for sure. So really, it starts with advanced manufacturing, and that’s heavily what I’m involved with in a day-to-day pace. And really what that means is next generation manufacturing leaning into American manufacturing for one, but also looking at robotics and automation, and how that’s going to be coming into the manufacturing workspace and supporting it as it grows. So, what we’ve created as a campus is this advanced manufacturing hub. So, we have my process lab, which we’ll talk about here in a second, and then we have two additional labs that are more academics focused. So, to explain what that means, the idea is if somebody has a two-year associate’s degree, and they’re working, and they want to come back and finish that and walk away with a bachelor’s degree, they can come and take an additional two years from us and walk away with some sort of a robotics engineering degree or mechanical engineering technology degree or something like that. So, I bring that up because, all underneath this umbrella of advanced manufacturing, we’re trying to support academic needs and trying to help people that want to get degrees work towards degree completion.
But there’s also a whole professional development and research side as well. So, the other thing that I like to tell people, and I didn’t honestly realize this until I started working for K-State is, there’s kind of two sides to a university, and ours is no different. So, there’s the traditional academic side that you guys might think of as four year degrees or even graduate level degrees and so on. And then behind the scenes, there’s typically a non-academic side and that’s more research, people in labs, even some of the professional development type stuff that I get into. So, that’s actually the side of the university that I live in is that non-academic side. So, I’m staff. I show up 12 months out of the year, all that kind of good stuff. But it’s a good place to be because we’re able to move pretty quickly. We’re not necessarily limited by having to seek approval for certain programming. So, a lot of times we can listen and hear the needs of industry and then try to stand something up pretty quickly to move forward.
That’s all the advanced manufacturing side. And then kind of underneath that, we’re working to build several pillars. So, I mentioned robotics and automation. Those will each be a pillar as we grow. I mean, this whole program is relatively new. I mean, from the initial concepts probably started about two years ago. So, like I mentioned, there’s pillars. So, the other pillar, and this is really our foundation right now, is bulk solids. And it always seems like kind of an odd niche, but this is somewhere where K-State has always had strong presence. So, Kansas is a wheat state. Through the years, been a lot of pneumatic conveying history here because of flour milling. So, as flour mills grew and expanded in the 50s and 60s and so on, they had to do something with that flour. So, people started putting their heads together and started kind of coming up with some ideas for pneumatic conveying. And I’m sure there were other people, you know, in different parts of the country chasing the same concepts. But anyway, that’s a long way of saying there’s a lot of history from material handling here in Kansas.
And K-State has had programs around this for years, and more specifically they’ve had a bulk solids program for about, let’s say about 10 years. And as we stood up this advanced manufacturing program in Olathe, it made a lot of sense to pull that bulk solids program here. Where we’re at in Kansas City, we’re near a major airport, so it’s easy for people to get in and out for classes. We also have a ton of industry support here locally as well, and just generally a fit with the whole advanced manufacturing concept that we were working with. So, that’s kind of a high level of what we’re up to here.
So how do industrial folks in that area, how do they partner with you? Do they come to you and say, hey, we’ve got this thing, we want to get from A to B. Can you help us figure that out? And you guys try to simulate that in the lab? Or how do you cross over to the actual, you know, from the lab to the factory, to the real world space?
Yeah, it’s great question. I mean, the truth is we try to support people in a lot of different ways. One way is just trying to get out to people’s sites and listening to what their problems are and trying to respond. Another is getting people here to where they can participate in some sort of a round table. And again, we’re just trying to listen and build programming that is relevant. Because the last thing we want to do is be sitting here trying to develop what we think is a good idea and it’s not actually helping anybody. But more to your specific question. Yeah. So, we get approached to do research projects. The nice thing about our labs is we’re neutral point where we’re not necessarily tied to a particular process or particular manufacturer. The other thing is when people come to us and do testing, generally we turn the data over to them. They own the report, they own whatever data. So, a good example of like a research project that we’re working on might be specialty piping or specialty elbows where somebody’s handling something like plastic pellets and they want to understand velocities that’s moving through the line, to where, are they going to see degradation issues. I’m not sure if that answered your question or not, but that’s kind a long line of where I’ve been involved.
No, it does. And of course, we get the trade publications from Powder and Bulk Solids and all that. We see all the new piping innovations, the new coatings, the new changes in elbows and things like that to take care of hammer and flow and all that. And so, it’s cool to hear that it starts with you guys, and you guys are kind of the leading edge of that research and development.
We certainly try to be. Thank you.
Yeah, love it. So, you talked about people coming in and finishing a degree program or working with the labs kind of from a professional standpoint, like, hey, we need help with this. But the way we got connected is through some of this professional development stuff. Can you talk a little bit about the professionals that come in and what kind of courses and how you guys are helping the industry through that?
For sure. So just to dive into that head first. So, we offer typically a professional development course every other month. So, six courses a year. I guess maybe to explain what exactly that looks like. It’s typically a two day, sometimes a three-day course, and we’ll pick a topic like dust collection or pneumatic conveying. Sometimes we do kind of a broad overview of bulk solids. We’re actually to the point where we’re looking at what next year’s content is going to look like. So, we’ll do a course on like flowability from hoppers and silos and things like that.
What’s interesting is, at the university level, we’re kind of some of the only ones talking about that or offering that kind of content. You get some chemical engineering degree paths where they may have a class that’ll touch on it or talk about it for a semester or something. But it’s to a pretty specific audience. But what we do is we offer this very, very specific, very needed content. Again, not a lot of people are talking about pneumatic conveying or pneumatic conveying best practice or calculations or anything like that. So, we offer, again, those two-day courses. And it amazes me where people find us and come from. One of the coolest stories was a gentleman found us from Guatemala and flew up here and took our two-day course, and then he actually came back.
And I love telling the story because I think it’s awesome. But he was from Guatemala, and I don’t know if he’d never been this far north or exactly what the situation was, but the course was in the winter. And he came up like a day early, and he went ice skating here. And it was like the first time in his life he had ever gone ice skating. It was just, it was one of those stories I’ll hold onto for the rest of my life, I think.
That’s really cool. Yeah, having gotten involved in some of those courses, it is really cool to see just kind of the general interest, but then also it showcases the importance of what we’re talking about, I mean, in the bulk solids world and then us in kind of just the broader dust space. So, I mean, what are the challenges that people in industry are seeing when it comes to bulk solids conveying, collection, dust in general since we’re on OnAire?
I would say one of the challenges is lack of education, or just in general, tribal knowledge, right? Because we’re not taught these things at a high school level or in a traditional engineering or college level path. A lot of times you’re just learning by doing it wrong. And so, there’s a lot of convey systems that are maybe not working out there at optimum or especially dust collection systems. It’s easy to put together a system that seems like it’s working but maybe has other underlying issues going on. So that education component is definitely one of the challenges we face. If we’re being honest, I think another challenge that we face is, and this is my personal opinion, but I think higher education has been disconnected for too long from industry. And a lot of people are creating their own training programs and going out and learning on their own, which is great. But I think it speaks to us as higher education not reacting quick enough as we should have been through the years and through the decades. That’s truly a big part of what I need to overcome.
Yeah, that is interesting. Because, going to the dust collection course, I don’t know a ton about dust collectors or their design or anything like that. We work around them. But it was one of those things where one of the guys who taught a couple years ago, he was like, this was the original textbook. And he was like, here’s where a lot of these numbers for calculations go. He’s like, if you want to go back and find this 30-year-old textbook, that’s great, but now you have to go to each of the companies. They have their own standard flow rates, their own standard like, this is when you change from this size piping to the next size piping. And I would agree with you where it has left higher education and gone to the private sector, I mean, generally speaking.
And that was one of my challenges with my college experience was, it was very theoretical and very hands on and very, like you grew up in a rural setting and working on farm equipment and things like that. And so, then I got to college and you know, the people acing the tests in the front row couldn’t put a nut on a bolt, you know, kind of thing. And I was like, man, what am I doing? Like, you know, I feel like there’s a disconnect between what we’re talking about in class and how the real world actually works from my perspective. So, I love that you guys have created a bridge to bridge that gap and making it real and tangible.
For sure. So, the gentleman I mentioned that I met somebody at a career fair that introduced me to this whole kind of industrial equipment world. His name was Kent. He was my first boss out of college. He was a great guy. The first day on the job he took us out to lunch, and he shook our hands, and he said you have a four-year degree. Congratulations. That basically means you know how to do problem-solving. That like, none of what you learn is going to apply to what you do on a daily basis.
That’s exactly right.
And he was so right.
We talk about that a decent amount here. Like both having engineering degrees and everything. I told Jordan, I’m like, this doesn’t mean I know how to design things. And like we just talked about, doesn’t mean I can fix anything. I’m like, but I think the one thing that it showed was like, we’re good problem solvers. Like we can figure things out. You can research and go find some answers.
Yeah.
Can you hit on a little bit, circling into the dust space more specifically, where you were working and what you were doing in the bulk solids world before you did that. And let’s talk about some of the challenges that were present as far as like overhead dust and fugitive dust.
So, for me personally, for my career, like I said, took a job in this industry right out of college and just started learning on, I can’t quite say on the fly because I had a little bit of guidance along the way, but just picking up as much as I could. So, I worked designing pneumatic conveying systems for about seven years. So, I was the guy that would take it from a sales napkin sketch to system layout, system design, system calculations, and then eventually installing that in the field and commissioning it in the field. And it was a tough job. It was pretty fast paced, but it was like probably one of the best learning experiences of my life. And it was also kind of one of the first times where, you know, you would work on something for maybe a year at a time, and then you’d go out and you’d see it in reality and it like, well, that was dumb. I shouldn’t have that that way. And that was a pretty cool experience too, right? So, I did that for seven years, and dust collection was actually a big part of that, too. I would say, maybe not quite a 50-50 split, but there were a lot of dust collection systems in there too that I was working on.
And then again, just kind of for my personal career, I worked for sales for that same company for about four years and did more account management type stuff and building relationships and so on. Then I eventually heard about the opportunity here at K-State, and I came over and had been here again for about a year and half. But I think your question was more along the lines, too, of what challenges was I seeing? Is that correct? Yeah.
Yep, correct.
You know, I was kind of thinking about that ahead of time and, it just seems like dust, and especially dust that can easily be pulled into your lungs, is not taken very seriously. You know, I think about some of the processes that I’ve been in and been around and just seen some pretty nasty stuff that people are pulling in and probably, you know, certainly will have in their lungs for a long time, if not the rest of their lives. And I see that as a challenge. I see that as something that’s not well understood. And I think as an industry is something that we really need to step up and do better and take better care of our employees. So, I think, you know, I don’t necessarily mean to loop us back to the education point, but I do see that as a challenge as well. You have all this tribal knowledge that can be built up within a particular company, and how you effectively put that back to the employees within the company or share that even within the broader engineering community. So, I would say, off the top of my head, those are two challenges that immediately come to mind.
Yeah, that’s one of the pushbacks that we always get. It’s like, you guys are blowing the dust around, so everybody’s going to be breathing it in a lot more. I think that’s eventually one of the ways that we got connected because, I think we did it with the AZEK company, the particulate study. I think that’s the first place that you saw the fans. And so, yeah, it is a challenge because everybody is worried about it. And it is a real threat like you’re talking about. This stuff that you’re breathing in, you know, we lived through this like big push on tobacco and everything. It’s like, no, it’s fine. You can breathe it in. It’s not a big problem. Once it goes in, it’s gone. But yeah, we’re doing this day in and day out across the country in manufacturing locations. But you know, we tackle it through agglomeration by making it too big to stay suspended or anything and falling to the ground. But yeah, that is good to hear.
Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s kind of a cool story in itself. The first time I saw you guys’ fans was at an AZEK facility, and I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know this technology really existed. And we were walking around and a coworker, it was my first time in that plant, a coworker who was more familiar with it, he pointed out, he’s like, yeah, look at these crazy fans, they blow and then, you know, they move in all these weird angles. And I think the way that he explained it to me was it was to keep the dust out of the rafters. And I’ve since learned that there’s a little bit more to it than that. So that was my first, you know, experience to it. And then later on, I was at another facility in Chicago that was handling graphite. And this is a particular facility that I had been in and out of many times through my career. It was one of the first startups I went on, and it was actually, towards the end of my career, was one of the last sites that I had been a part of as well.
And it was a pretty rough and nasty process. And I saw your guys’…Let me back that up. As I was preparing to come to K-State, the engineering manager, I’d shared with him that I was leaving my previous role, and he called and he said, you got to check these guys out at SonicAire. We bought some of their fans and it has totally cleaned up our process and has totally changed the way that we do business.
I thought that was a cool story worth sharing as well. It really speaks to you guys. And it was kind of at that point that I knew that you guys had something that I needed to familiarize myself with and get to know you a little bit.
I love it. That’s a great story. It’s hard to convey to people exactly what the equipment does. I was talking to somebody this past week from my kid’s school and they were like, you could see the light bulb was not going off as I was explaining it, and they said, I’d like to see that in person. I’m like, well, there’s a local woodworking shop that’s got some fans in it here. You should go over there and check them out, kind of thing. But you do, you kind of have to see it and experience it for yourself before you truly understand and can appreciate the work that the fans do.
I typically start with the fun answer. I say we make sure plants don’t explode. And then I back into like, yeah, we do it with these fans. And they’re like, I’ve heard of that. I’ve seen those. I’m like, no, you haven’t. That’s not what you’re talking about. Like we can circle back. But yeah, we make sure people don’t blow up. It’s typically what I lead with.
That’s always fun to try to explain to people what you do. Like for a long time, trying to explain what pneumatic conveying was. And I finally just got worn down to the point where it’s like, I work with industrial equipment.
That’s funny. Yeah. Well, cool. So, you’re kind of in the education space. You’re on the leading edge of where we’re going with manufacturing and working on that education piece that, I mean, we struggle with too, getting our customers on board with what we’re trying to do with dust. So, from that vantage point, what do you see as kind of the future of us taking care of dust and handling those processes?
Yeah, boy, it’s hard to have a conversation nowadays without talking about data, certainly AI, but data as well. And again, back to the previous comment about taking care of our employees and taking care of air quality. I sincerely hope and believe that’s where we should be going. And I think that maybe it’s an area where I just need to educate myself more where I’m not familiar with the products that are out there But I would love to see more with data acquisition as far as monitoring indoor air quality and tracking that data and understanding if what we’re doing is good, if it needs to be improved, if so, how do we improve it? Yeah, what do you guys think? Am I off in left field there with that?
I was thinking we might have to hide this section of the podcast from Brad because he’s going to be like, I told you guys so. He’s like, let’s speed this up and get the data collection on the fan. But yeah, that’s where we’re spending a lot of our time and effort, is pairing up with these companies that are working on data capture in your equipment so that you can more actively handle the problem, whether it’s monitoring systems, getting tied into Internet of Things so that you’re live, getting a live feedback type system, or even sensing. I mean, we’ve talked about how to make sure that we’re targeting the correct areas automatically. So yeah, we would agree from what we’ve seen.
Yeah. I mean, if you zoom out, it makes a lot of sense. We’ve talked before about, there’s different approaches to an overall dust mitigation strategy. So first of all, having a clean and tight process where hoppers are well sealed and so on.
Second level is having some sort of dust collection system to mitigate whatever fugitive dust there is. And then third level is good housekeeping. I think that’s really where you guys shine. And then you add in that kind of fourth layer of, I’ll just generically call it data acquisition or air quality monitoring, to kind of back check that all those previous systems were working. And to me that just seems far too logical, far too easy, and I’m disappointed that we’re not already doing it as a manufacturing society.
Yep. We joke about kind of the grain industry and the areas that you guys work in just because of that whole adoption thing. It’s like, when new technology is coming out, it’s going to be very slow to be introduced into industry. We’ve been doing things the same way.
A hundred years. It still works. Why do we need this new stuff? That’s expensive. And you have convince people with ROI and the benefits and the pain and what you’re missing out on today versus what you could experience tomorrow.
Yeah.
Absolutely. All right, Jonathan, well, before we get you out of here, and we’re super appreciative for the time that we’ve had with you today, what is the one piece of advice that these plant managers and process and safety engineers need to know in your industry?
One piece of advice that people need to know…I think a lot about understanding the true cost of something. So, for example, I’m getting ready to buy an air compressor for our lab. It’s pretty sizable, 75 horsepower unit. And compressed air is just always something that I’ve taken for granted. But now that I needed to buy one, I’ve understood it more and understood the true cost of that. And that’s kind of more around utilities, right? And that’s probably relatively easy to calculate and it’s a case of me being behind the times. But I think, kind of thinking along those same lines, you can take that to a maintenance perspective and take that to, you know, this elbow in my conveying system keeps wearing out time after time in time. What do I need to buy on the front end so that I have a good product there? So that I don’t have to replace it every year, maybe every 10 years. And then can I make that money back over time? I think, kind of thinking more about the whole air quality topic that we were talking about before, that’s a much harder calculation to make, right? Somebody’s impact on their health. But I think we have to start somewhere. I’m not sure if that answered your question or not.
No, it does. Absolutely. True cost as far as whether it’s a system like us or even taking it a step further and understanding what’s going on with your employees is going to impact everything that you do.
And not only the equipment cost, but the run cost, too. That’s an easily overlooked thing when people are thinking about the cost of housekeeping. They think about, I’ll buy a scissor lift and I’ll buy an air compressor or whatever, but it takes a lot of labor to keep it going. And then there’s also even the electrical costs for running that 75 horsepower to fuel the air wands that they’re just blowing dust from one location to another. So that can add up quite quickly. Compressed air is very expensive, not only for the equipment, but also to make it as well. A lot of hidden costs in there.
Yeah, I’m actually really glad you said that because, Taylor, that’s something you and I have talked about. I think even the last time that we were together in person. Yeah, I think it’s easy to overlook, but something that we shouldn’t be. Yeah. Very good point. And it speaks to your product too. And the housekeeping abilities that it offers.
Oh yeah. All right. Well, Jonathan, it’s been a pleasure. We’re super thankful for you and spending the time with us today. It’s been super insightful. Thank you so much.
Thank you guys. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity, and it was a pleasure to get to know you a little bit better here. Thank you.
Jonathan, we’ll be at GEAPS, the Grain Elevator Expo coming up in Kansas City in March, I believe it is. So, hope you can come by the booth and see us there.
I will, I’m planning to be there, so look forward to it.
Love it. Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of the OnAire Podcast where you can get all things dust. So, be sure to like and subscribe and follow us on our new YouTube channel, your source for all things on dust. Thanks for watching. See you next time.