Adam Wiggins, Data Center Segment Manager for Camfil, opened his Mining Disrupt Dallas talk with a picture most of the room had seen a version of: sunlight coming through a window, with particles drifting in the beam. Those specks, he said, are about as small as the human eye can see, roughly 10 microns. The dust that gets into a mining operation is mostly far smaller than that. Wiggins works with constructors, design engineers, end users, owners and operators for a global air filter manufacturer, and he had ten minutes to make one argument: the air filter is the smallest ticket item in a mining budget and one of the largest levers on profitability.
This session was recorded at Mining Disrupt Dallas 2025, November 12–14, 2025. Bitcoin traded at $104,994 at the time of the event; as of October 11, 2026, it trades at $83,012.
The Invisible Threat: 99% of Particles Are Too Small to See
Wiggins walked through the scale of what sits in a cubic foot of air. Pollen is about 15 microns. A human hair is about 50. Sand is about 90 microns, salt about 60, and the chart runs down from there. The number he wanted the room to take away was at the other end of it.
99% of all particles are below one micron in size.
Adam Wiggins · 4:30
Size matters when you start looking at filtration, he said, because particles are a huge risk to a mining operation and to its profitability. He framed that risk in two lifespans. The physical lifespan is how long a miner can run, which he put at roughly five to seven years; proper filtration slows depreciation, safeguards the machine and reduces downtime. The economic lifespan is how long the miner stays profitable, which he put at two to four or three to five years; good filtration helps sustain peak hashrate efficiency, helps with SLA agreements and stretches the profitability window.
Why the Lab Rating Doesn't Match West Texas Reality
MERV, he reminded the audience, stands for minimum efficiency reporting value, and the word is reporting, not rated. It is the industry standard for stating a filter's efficiency. The test measures capture in three particle-size channels, runs a dust-holding-capacity test, and stamps the filter with whichever channel captured the lowest percentage. That becomes the MERV number on the box.
The test is in a lab environment and lab environments aren't like West Texas.
Adam Wiggins · 6:14
A lab is controlled. It does not see variable air flow speeds, variable particulate counts, shifting air quality or wildfires. Buying on MERV alone, Wiggins said, is a big risk, which is why Camfil wants operators to look at conditioning efficiency instead.
The Electrostatic Trick: How Filters Lose Their Hold
Conditioning efficiency comes from an appendix to the ASHRAE 522 test called Appendix J. The lab takes the filter, discharges it with isopropyl alcohol, and then runs the same MERV test again.
what the isopropyl alcohol does, it discharges a electrostatic charge that's on that filter.
Adam Wiggins · 7:10
A lot of filter manufacturers rely on that charge, and some of it occurs naturally. On day one the charged filter hits its efficiency number because the charge is helping it. As dust, dirt, pollen and sand build up, the charge dissipates and the efficiency goes with it. Wiggins put two MERV 9 filters side by side, the original test in the left column and the Appendix J result on the right. The filter on the left tested as a MERV 9 the first time around.
it actually only tested at a [MERV] 7A.
Adam Wiggins · 8:15
The gap in percent of particles captured between those two results, he said, can mean massive performance differences in a mining operation. The filter on the right, Camfil's Dual 9 MERV 9A, started as a nine, tested as a nine, and after Appendix J still hit a nine. His advice was to ask for MERV-A, which he described as cradle-to-grave performance. Camfil guarantees its MERV-A rated filters will test to that rating from day one to day end, and he challenged the room to ask their suppliers and vendors for the same.
The Cost of Low Price: Unit Price vs. Total Cost of Ownership
Wiggins then explained why the small particles matter inside the machine. Particles of roughly one to 10 microns get into miners through the filters and around the cracks and settle on the heat sink, where air can no longer pull the heat off. He called this thermal insulation. Miners then need a repair or throttle down, and the operation enters what he called the hashrate degradation cycle: dust accumulates, heat transfer drops, internal temperature rises, miners throttle, the dirt load drives fan energy use up through pressure, hashrate falls, miners break or come offline, filters get changed, and the cycle starts again.
Pressure drop, the resistance a filter builds against the fans, is where the energy story lives. He showed a three-year pressure drop curve for two products, modeled to one inch of pressure drop, with filter X on the blue line and Camfil's product on the black one. The longer-lasting product was changed three times over the period against nine for the other, which also saves labor, but the bigger number was electricity.
one of them used 7.8 million kilowatt hours and one of them used 6.7 million kilowatt hours.
Adam Wiggins · 10:42
A lot of buyers, he said, look only at unit price: a MERV 8 filter at four dollars against a MERV 8 at six dollars, and they buy the four-dollar one.
Well, that's assuming they all perform the same way. And absolutely, they do not perform the same way.
Adam Wiggins · 11:33
The TCO picture has the filter cost in it, but the big driver is the energy spent pushing air through the filter, then labor, then how many times the filter has to be bought, shipped in and hauled away as waste.
The Profit Lever: Treating Filtration as an Asset, Not an Expense
He closed with a 30-megawatt data center example. On the list of costs sit utility, distribution, power, containers, buildings and real estate; the smallest ticket item is the air filter, at roughly half a percent to one percent, which he summed up as less than one percent on both capex and opex. Tiny cost, huge impact, in his words, and a big effect on profitability.
It can be actually a profit leader lever for you.
Adam Wiggins · 13:05
His review slide was short. Look at the filter as a profit lever, not a cost center. Small particles cause huge problems. Ask for MERV-A, because a MERV filter should perform from cradle to grave. Optimize air flow with longer-lasting filters that run at a lower pressure drop, since everything under the pressure drop curve is money. And judge filters on total cost rather than unit cost. Camfil, he said, has been around 62 years, is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, has roughly 5,700 employees, about 30 manufacturing plants and six research and development centers, and its pitch to miners rests on guaranteed product performance, including a written double-life-cycle guarantee on some of its pleated panels and a clipless Fast Frame that he said cuts filter change-out time by about 30 percent. Your air, as his last slide put it, is Camfil's business.