Many businesses of all sizes have chosen to invest in their very own paint booth. If your business requires the regular use of an industrial paint booth, the time and costs associated with outsourcing your paint jobs can quickly become too much. Because of this, purchasing and maintaining a paint booth can be a long term cost saving strategy for many businesses, both small and large.

There are hundreds of options on the market, each of which is optimized for a different type of work. Contact one of our advisors if you need help choosing the paint booth that is right for your business.

Once you have your paint booth up and running, you might start wondering how to maximize its efficiency. While there are plenty of tips and tricks that can improve the efficiency of your paint booth, there are two key factors to consider when planning out the yearly budget for your paint booth.

The first is that keeping your paint booth well maintained will increase its longevity. Skipping recommended maintenance might seem to cut down on costs, but this strategy will backfire in the long run.

The second thing to remember is that taking advantage of all of the available technological upgrades can keep your paint booth running efficiently. Updating your paint booth will also increase short term costs while majorly decreasing long term costs.

Take Care of All Routine Maintenance

While regular maintenance and upkeep my seem like an additional cost, it can actually help to decrease your long term operating costs. A well maintained paint booth will last much longer and will need far fewer expensive, unexpected repairs down the road.

In order to streamline this process as much as possible, our team offers a customizable selection of maintenance plans. By taking advantage of one of these maintenance plans, you can rest assured that all of the required monthly or yearly maintenance items are taken care of. This can give you piece of mind as well as help you determine a fixed cost for all of your routine maintenance, making it easier to budget appropriately.

Some maintenance plans include a yearly visit to clean your paint booth, grease its moving parts, and swap out air filters. While this might work well for smaller shops, those that produce high volume will need more frequent checkups. If your paint booths undergo heavy usage, consider a maintenance plan that includes quarterly checkups or even monthly visits. When it comes to this type of maintenance, it is better to be safe than sorry. Skipping this cleaning and regreasing process can cause long term damage to your paint booth.

Schedule Your Filter Changes Ahead of Time

Any paint booth expert will tell you that regular filter changes are one of the most important maintenance tasks for any paint booth. Your intake and exhaust filters will both need to be switched out periodically. Exhaust filters in particular are prone to clogging with heavy usage. They will typically need to be changed after 60 hours of spraying, or approximately once every 2 weeks.

One the most useful services we offer our clients is the ability to set up automatic shipments for their replacement air filters. If you are interested in having your air filters delivered to your shop at a preset interval, call one of our team members to learn how to set this up. We understand that every shop’s air filter needs are different, so these automatic shipments are fully customizable, both in size and in frequency. If you need help deciding what to include in your automatic shipments, our team is happy to discuss your shop’s typical usage and help you decide what to order and when.

Consider the Layout of the Shop

While your intake filter will eliminate a lot of the dust and dirt in the air, keeping the area surrounding your paint booth as clean as possible can go a long way towards keeping the inside of the booth clean. Most shops will work most efficiently if it is a one way track for the parts. Moving the parts from the prep area into the booth and then out the other side is usually a cleaner process than bringing painted parts back into the prep area. Think about your workflow when deciding where to set up your paint booth.

Keep and Eye on Your Control Panel

While this might seem obvious, your paint booth’s control panel can provide you with a lot of useful information about the current status of your paint booth components. One particularly useful piece of information is the number of spray hours your booth has logged since its last filter change. This is an easy way to tell if your filters will need to be changed sooner than expected or if you can wait a little longer to switch them out. Many control panels will even tell you if a filter is unexpectedly clogged, alerting the operator that it will need to be replaced sooner than originally planned.

In addition to tracking spray hours, your paint booth’s control panel can track bake hours. In many paint booths it is even possible to preprogram bake cycles for your most often produced parts. Your control panel can also save some of your most commonly used paint recipes, making it easier to reproduce many common procedures in the future. Keeping your control panel software up to date can help to keep these processes running smoothly, allowing you to minimize repetitive user input and maximize efficiency.

Use High Quality Lighting

While it might be possible to cut some corners, you should not skimp on your lighting. Many clients want a specific shade of each color, and it is much easier to match colors in a well lit paint booth. While energy efficient light fixtures can be a great way to save money, you will want to make sure that there are no shadows in your paint booth and that it is well lit from every angle.