There are other aftercooler ideas on this forum. Also, you can place them after the tank if you don’t want to modify your compressor. The idea is cooling the air causes the moisture to condense allowing you to catch it with leg drops in you lines or water seperators.
As @DnKFab and @Dobber have said, put them together for a complete system to have clean dry air.
You want to cool the air going into your air dryer but there will likely still be moisture so add the desiccant filter and finally a very fine particle filter. There are a number of discussions on this forum. Search aftercooler, dry air, etc.
The money you spend on this pays you back by extending the life of your plasma consumables.
@apynckel having a separator after the aftercooler is a a good way to go. Get one with auto drain as will be easier keeping it drained. Any water you can keep out of your compressor tank keeps if from being downstream and also rusting the tank as much.
Okay, so I’m checking my air compressor to see what I’m going to need to plumb this all, and it uses an o-ring’d seal on the fitting coming out of the compressor, and a compression fitting going down into the tank. What do I need to use for the fitting coming out of the compressor to adapt into the derale?
Craftsman CMXECXM301
Also, is this air separator / dryer combo going to be enough?
This may be the the compression fitting @TinWhisperer is referencing.
Not sure about the o-ring end. You might replace the oring all together. Maybe put a nipple and adapt from there.
I went to a race shop and had them make me a flexable hose (break line) to connetct to a fitting from the compressor to the derale AN8 fitting. I ran copper tube from the water separator to the tank and used the same compression fitting from mcmaster carr
That sounds like a significant leak. Did you just test the loop itself or compressor and cooler as one? If all together then might jot be that bad but seems to be significant. Was your compressor holding pressure before you added the cooler?
Did you find the fittings you needed? If not, look at a company called Evil Energy selling on Amazon. I got most of my fittings from them, and specifically one attach to the Derale cooler(8AN fitting). They have fittings that connect 8AN to 1/2" and 3/8" NPT.
Example of one I used:
I’m sure @toolboy will chime in, but it looks like both tanks and the refrigerated dryer are all plumbed into that white pipe running horizontal under the system, my guess is that’s a common drain line.
yup…I did all my pressure pipe in copper soldered or threaded with pipe dope…
the white pex goes from the drain lines on my copper cooler and passes by the tank drains and the refrigerated cooler…and now goes all the way to the sink in my shop…
due to the pex pipe…location of the sink I hardly hear the blow out of the units…
