I am looking for guidance or advice on using compressed airlines to clean inaccssable rarely visited areas of the factory. I am aware their use is not recommended but don't know what else we could use where a vacum cleaner is not an option. We are a small company so a full dust extraction system is likely to be beyond our means. Any useful alternatives would be helpful or limits regarding airline use

I believe I understand the OP’s point, I have a similar issue. We have moved away from high pressure airlines to high volume low pressure “blowers”, however these have their own issues. The “problem” with vacuum cleaners is one of the laws of physics “Ye cannae deny the laws of physics Captain” (humour me and try it in a mock Scottish accent!) ;-)) Vacuum cleaners are relatively high vacuum low volume devices, they are not designed to convey large particles, if they are high volume types then they require a large pick up surface area to ensure that they retain this level of air flow, as the cross sectional area of the pick up nozzle is reduced the pressure drop across the nozzle increases according to the laws of fluid flows. This results in large pressure changes across the nozzle orifice, this affects the carriage of particulate matter in the air stream, it can be improved or reduced depending on the direction of flow. Think about LEV systems, large heavy particles require higher air stream velocities to keep them “in suspension” thus higher volumes of air must pass to ensure that this happens in normal systems. A high pressure air line (circa 10 bar) will give immense volumetric expansion across the orifice at the output of the “blow gun” this can generate large volumetric flow, this will move large volumes of physically large particles of possibly significant mass. To implement the converse with a small cross sectional area orifice will require significant amounts of energy, and is NOT an easy engineering (physics) problem to solve. Think vacuum conveyors for products. Most vacuum conveyers are only utilised on high volume low mass product. Any questions please post. HTH Paul