While I generally agree with the expert(s) quoted I think common sense MUST prevail or we should all just get rid of our shops, not plan on enjoying anything and just sit back and wait for "something" to kill us since everything around us has no other purpose...
I have said many times on this forum that I am many times more concerned with the fine breathable dust in the air (that smoky looking cloud) than the chips that fall on the floor.
I have a lot of experience with dust of all kinds. As a life long farmer I have spent zillions of hours working in very extreme levels of dust of all kinds. Many of those huge clouds of dust contained some pretty toxic crap. Sitting out there for long hours on an open tractor tilling dry soil often had me in clouds so dense that even short range visibility was a problem. I started doing that work at age nine... Lots of freaky stuff lives in our soils. Lots of pathogens, fungi, molds and decomposing matter. At about age 12 I took over most of the feed grinding which was once or twice a week. I belted up a tractor to a hammer mill and ground feed for a dairy herd of about 45 and a few hundred hogs. Lots and lots of dust, some of it from moldy grain. Most folks have no idea of how much mold and crap is in what appears to be quite clean grain. Have you ever worked with an extra dusty batch of hay that got rained on? I have many times... But even the clean smelling fresh stuff is full of toxic dust of many kinds. At harvest for grains there are a zillion kinds of blights, rust etc. in that big cloud that hovers around a combine. Then there are those clouds of pesticides I worked in for many years... Still at 71 my lungs are pretty decent and will probably not be what kills me...
After spending 20 years also in the shoe repair business I have an additional huge exposure history to leather dust (some of it pretty nasty stuff) rubber dust and a huge amount of very toxic adhesives and solvent fumes. I consider myself to be very lucky to have so far dodged that bullet... In that shop I vented everything I could outside and that is my plan for my current woodshop.
When I say common sense I'm talking about just not freaking out over a little wood dust if you smoke 3 packs a day like one of my BIL's...
Who also drinks waaaay too much...
I learned in my shoe repair shops that venting outside did not cost me nearly as much as I expected in extra heating cost. Most of the time the shop was already warm and the amount of time that dust making machinery was running was actually fairly small and since there was a lot of warm concrete and steel in the shop the temps didn't drop all that much and what did drop recovered quickly (as in minutes).
When I got more serious about my woodshop I bought one of the Harbor Freight 2 HP dust collectors. Then as those things tend to happen
One of my son's co-workers bought a new house and moved. He had one of the Penn State 1-1/2 HP collectors like new that he didn't have room for and he offered it to me for $50... How do you turn something like that down?
I have been just using them as free-standing dust collectors so far but I want to get the bigger one sat up on a collection line with an outside exhaust very soon, as in maybe during January (my bypass surgeon should greatly reduce most of my restrictions next Thursday). I will run the line into a small grove of pine trees. This is a farm, I have no close neighbors.
In our case where we heat with a wood burning furnace (which sits in the woodshop) it is just a matter of tossing a few more pieces of wood in. Of course I will also need to bring in replacement clean air (from the attic) while the collector is running which will feed into the furnace cold air return. Otherwise the furnace would likely leak smoke when the collector was running. I was surprised at how little of a problem that was in the shoe shops but this house is a lot tighter than most of them were.
The common paper dust masks do not seal well due to my beard and I would probably just not do woodworking if I had to wear a heavy double respirator to do it... Last week I had my wife pick me up a box of ear-loop surgical mask which fit over my beard and have a bendable top strip to improve fit at the nose. Those are going to become a standard part of the woodshop.
I also want to build a ceiling mounted air scrubber for the shop to run most of the time I am there.
I just don't really give a rats behind about the coarser stuff that falls quickly to the floor... I spend much of my time clomping around the woods, across frozen ground full of deep horse tracks and in several barns full of meadow muffins, I don't consider a few woodchips a major fall hazard...
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