Hatt Kitchens

New Dust Extraction for New Factory

Hatt Kitchens is moving to a new factory in central Kidderminster that is only hundreds of yards from the company’s old site. Here the management has invested £175,000 in a new state-of-the-art dust extraction and waste incineration system from Dustraction.

Hatt makes a range of kitchens with fascia finishes in wood, paint, vinyl, or HPLs on cabinets designed for refurbishments and new-builds in rural, urban and suburban locations. Hatt seems an appropriate name for a company that has become successful by trading head on!

Centrally located in Kidderminster, the new factory is ideally placed, according to director, Andy Fletcher, to address the market countrywide. With 30 years of growth and experience comfortably under its corporate belt for 2008, management decided that property is the inward investment opportunity that cannot be ignored in today’s more affordable commercial environment.

Hatt’s new site remains the only factory in private ownership in an otherwise tenanted environment and it gives Andy Fletcher the clean-sheet start-up opportunity he wanted to bring the manufacturing shop floor bang up to date.

It also provided an impetus, alongside Leicester-based dust extraction equipment specialist manufacturers and suppliers, Dustraction, to bring Hatt Kitchens fully in line with locally sensitive environmental issues.

New Dustrax Cyclone Filter

The new Dustraction installation at Hatt Kitchens includes a Dustrax 5×7 cyclo-filter collecting from two groups of machines in two different parts of the factory.

The collective throughput volume of air handled by the system overall is almost 70,000 cfm driven by a Dustrax 52PB fan set serving one group of 18 machines and a Dustrax 46PB fan set serving another group of 13; both of the Dustraction fan sets feature vee belt drives and 75Kw motors.

Output from the Dustrax 5×7 cyclo filter is collected by a com¬mon 30m3 storage silo to feed a WT25A boiler unit by Dustraction technology partner, Wood Waste Technology for factory heating and the elimination of waste collection and disposal costs.

The fully automatic WT25A boiler unit represents a breakthrough in woodwaste incineration terms, which has been designed, with fewer moving parts and more efficient combustion features, to out-last and out-perform incinerators of more traditional type.

A Votecs EZ6/1 chipper will reduce all solid off-cuts to cyclo filter-manageable dust and eliminates any further need for waste disposal by other mechanical means.

Dustraction Sanding Bench

The installation by Dustraction of two of the company’s new Dustrax sanding and denibbing benches address part of an ultimate requirement for three in the finishing of solid timber fascias which are, according to Andy Fletcher, the frontals that drive the largest proportion of sales, both for Hatt Kitchens and also for Hatt’s increasingly popular Karma range of fitted bedrooms.