Engineered extraction that captures welding fume, wood dust, solvent vapour and oil mist at the machine — before it reaches anyone’s breathing zone. Surveyed, designed, installed and commissioned across Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.
This page is deliberately price-free. An LEV system is engineered around your process, not picked off a list — the number only exists after a survey. Ask us for a site survey on WhatsApp.
Local is the whole idea. A general extract fan changes the air in a building; local exhaust ventilation puts a capture point at the machine, so the fume, dust or vapour is drawn away in the first second of its life — while it is still concentrated, still moving predictably, and still nowhere near a worker’s face. Once a contaminant has escaped into the general air of a workshop, the amount of air you have to move to deal with it goes up enormously, and you are diluting a problem rather than removing it.
In practice an LEV installation in a Klang Valley factory or workshop looks like a hood or booth over the work, ducting overhead, an air cleaner of some kind, a fan, and a discharge to outside the building. Each of those is sized against the others. A generous hood on an undersized fan does nothing. A powerful fan on a badly placed hood pulls contaminated air across the operator on its way to the duct. This is why LEV is bought as a designed system with a stated design basis, not as a shopping list of parts — and why a supplier who quotes you a fan and a length of duct over the phone has not understood the job.
ClickBina installs and maintains LEV as part of our industrial and commercial mechanical work, alongside commercial kitchen exhaust and ducting → for F&B and the wider building maintenance service →.
The most common thing we are shown on a first visit is a large wall-mounted extract fan, installed in good faith, doing very little for the person actually breathing the fume. The distinction matters enough to be blunt about:
If a supplier offers you “LEV” that is in fact a bigger wall fan, you are buying dilution with an LEV price tag. Ask where the capture point is. If there is no hood at the process, it is not LEV.
Every properly engineered system has the same five elements, and a weakness in any one of them shows up as poor capture at the hood:
The discharge point is also a building question, not only a mechanical one. Cutting a new penetration through a factory roof is a waterproofing job in its own right — see factory & warehouse roof waterproofing → and metal roof sheeting repair → before anyone puts a hole in your roof.
The hood is the part buyers think about least and the part that decides the outcome. Broadly, the more the hood encloses the process, the less air it takes to control it:
| Hood type | How it works | Typically used for | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enclosing hood / booth | The process sits inside the hood; contaminated air cannot readily escape | Spray finishing, powder handling, small-parts blasting | Most effective per unit of air moved; needs space and can restrict access to the work |
| Partial enclosure / bench booth | Three sides enclosed, open face where the operator works | Bench sanding, soldering, small welding jobs | Good balance of control and access; the open face has to be sized correctly |
| Captor hood (moveable arm) | Articulated arm the operator repositions at each new job | Welding, brazing, laboratory and repair benches | Flexible, but performance depends entirely on the operator putting it in the right place, every time |
| Receiving hood (canopy) | Sits where the contaminant is already heading — typically above a hot process | Furnaces, hot dip tanks, heat-driven plumes | Only works when the process throws the contaminant into it; a poor choice for cold processes and never over a leaning operator |
| On-tool extraction | Extraction built into the tool itself | Orbital sanders, cut-off saws, concrete grinders | Excellent capture and portable; needs the right tool and disciplined use of it |
Send us a photo of the job on WhatsApp — we reply with an instant quote.
💬 Get Your Instant QuoteNote the recurring theme: the hoods that depend on operator behaviour need supervision and training to keep working, and the ones that do not are the ones that get in the way. That trade-off is a design conversation to have before the order, not a surprise at commissioning.
If your workshop does any of the following, extraction is normally an engineering question rather than a comfort one. What follows is a map of what is in the air, not a diagnosis — only assessment of your actual process tells you what you are dealing with:
| Process | What goes into the air | Capture approach usually considered |
|---|---|---|
| MIG / MMA / TIG welding, brazing | Metal fume from the consumable and the parent metal, plus shielding-gas by-products | Moveable capture arms at each bay, or on-torch extraction |
| Grinding, cutting, deburring | Metal and abrasive particulate, sparks | Downdraught bench or partial enclosure with spark arrest before the filter |
| Woodworking — saws, routers, sanders | Wood dust, fine at the sander | On-machine extraction ducted to a central collector |
| Spray painting, coating, lacquering | Solvent vapour and paint overspray | Enclosing spray booth with filtration on the discharge |
| Solvent degreasing, dipping, cleaning | Vapour from the tank surface | Slot or rim extraction along the tank edge |
| Soldering and electronics rework | Rosin and flux fume at the bench | Small captor arm or tip extraction at each station |
| Powder handling, bagging, mixing | Fine airborne powder at transfer points | Enclosure at the transfer point, filtered before discharge |
| Machining with cutting fluid | Oil mist | Enclosed machine with a mist collector |
Because these are process questions, the useful first step is nearly always someone competent standing in the workshop watching the job being done — not a phone call.
We will be careful here, and you should be too. Occupational safety in Malaysia is regulated by DOSH — the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, under the Ministry of Human Resources — with the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 as the framework statute. Where a workplace’s indoor air is concerned, DOSH’s Industry Code of Practice on Indoor Air Quality puts a duty on the employer to keep the air within acceptable limits, which is the same duty that makes a neglected ventilation system an employer’s problem and not just a comfort complaint.
What we will not do on this page is print a regulation number, an examination interval, a required capture velocity or an airflow figure for your system. Which specific requirements bite — and how often anything has to be examined — depends on the contaminant, the process and the plant, and getting that wrong in print would be worse than useless to you. Confirm the requirements that apply to your process with DOSH or with a competent person engaged for that purpose, and make your contractor state in writing which requirement their design answers.
Two other threads are worth knowing about, because both are already familiar to anyone who has fitted out a commercial or industrial unit here:
Also check your contractor’s CIDB registration and grade and confirm it is current — construction and installation work carries that registration requirement independently of anything DOSH asks for.
An LEV system is invisible in operation. You cannot see whether it is capturing, and by the time a health problem tells you it is not, it has been failing for a long time. Paperwork is the only thing that converts “we installed it properly” into something you can hold a contractor to:
| Document | What it must show | Ask for it |
|---|---|---|
| Written design basis | The process, the contaminant it is designed to capture, each hood and its position, and the performance the system is designed to achieve — signed by whoever designed it | Before you accept the quotation |
| Contractor registration | Current CIDB registration and grade, plus any other registration the works require, produced on request and not described vaguely | At tender |
| Commissioning report | Measured performance at every hood, compared against the stated design basis, with the instruments and date recorded | At handover, before final payment |
| As-built drawings | Hood positions, duct sizes and routes, fan location, filter position and the discharge point as actually built | At handover |
| O&M manual and filter schedule | What is cleaned, what is replaced, at what frequency, to the equipment manufacturer’s instructions — with part numbers | At handover |
| Examination arrangements | Who examines the system, on what basis, and who keeps the record — stated by the contractor, not assumed by you | Before handover |
The commissioning report is the one people skip and the one that matters most. Without a measured baseline at handover, nobody can ever say whether the system has degraded — and a filter that is slowly loading up degrades an LEV system quietly for months.
We are not going to guess a number for you. We will tell you exactly what moves it, so that when two quotations differ you can see why:
You cannot compare two LEV quotations that are both a single lump sum. Require every bidder to price the same schedule, and the differences become visible immediately:
Anything not on that list, that a bidder has assumed you will provide, is a variation order waiting to happen. Make them write it down.
Tell us what you need — we reply within the hour.