Pre-cleaning air for more demanding or specialized downstream filters to increase their working lives and reduce the costs of their maintenance is a common application for filters and filter-blower combinations. Pre-cleaning air for applications such as feeding engines is also common. Light-weight filters suffice in many of these applications such as many home heating systems or automobiles.
However, when the demands become more extreme such as keeping the cooling system clean in a bakery or feeding air to the engine of a military tank, these inexpensive solutions become expensive, especially when pre-cleaning air. Maintenance becomes frequent, the filter media requires replacement so often that it too becomes costly, and the downtime during maintenance or caused by the failures of the filters sometimes becomes the costliest problem of all.