How to Keep a Paint Booth’s Temperature Controlled During the Summer
With summer in full swing, temperatures are heating up! Painters should learn to make the heat work for them, not against, using it to their advantage. However, if not properly accommodated for, a rise in temperatures can cause issues for a shop. Here’s our best tips for how to keep a paint booth’s temperature controlled during the summertime.
How to Paint During a Heatwave
As states across the country begin to experience a rise in temperatures, it can become more difficult to regulate the heat within a shop. Air conditioning units have to work extra hard to keep spaces cool, including paint booth AMUs. While there’s not much that can be done to cool down temperatures in a booth, there are several best practices that should be followed.
- Always remember when painting in the heat, slower is always faster. Slower catalysts and reducers are your friend.
- Allow the booth to run after a flash or heat cycle to let the cabin naturally cool down.
- Always be sure to run a bake cycle for only as long as needed, any additional time will make it take that much longer to cool down.
- Do not open the doors to let out heat after a bake cycle! Leaving the doors open will allow bugs and other airborne contaminants into the cabin’s air, all while leaving the stacks heated and not cooled.
Pro-tip: If your booth has ceiling fans, keep them on (dialed down, of course) with the doors closed to maintain a cool breeze inside the cabin while pulling plastic.
How to Use High Temperatures to Your Advantage
As a paint booth’s standing temperature is generally higher in the summer, it tends to take less time to heat up on warmer days. This is beneficial for several reasons. First, by needing less power to heat up, energy costs can decrease over the summer. Second, flash times are typically quicker in the summer, as painters can let the environment work for them and allow the natural heat to speed up the cycle. And lastly, by shortening the time needed for flash and bake cycles, shops could potentially turn out more jobs per day.
What to Do if Your Booth Overheats
We’ve gotten questions before of, “can my booth overheat in the summer?” and the answer is yes AND no. We have many safety precautions in our booths to keep from being overheated. Believe it or not, lack of changing ceiling filters can actually cause a booth to overheat as air cannot escape the ceiling cavity quick enough, thus raising the temperature inside the cavity and tripping a heat switch.
One thing to keep in mind is getting too much heat too fast can cause solvents to dry too quickly. This disrupts the painting process because solvents on the bottom layer cannot evacuate as fast as the top layer, leading to solvent entrapment. Painters may even have to start over or redo certain parts of the job.
As we mentioned earlier, painters need to learn to work with the heat and make it work for them. If your booth starts acting up or your paint jobs don’t come out as they were just a few weeks ago, try adjusting the booth settings for the additional heat. Slight tweaks in temperature, flash time, or pressure settings can help to create a better painting environment during the summer.
Keep Up with Your Paint Booth Maintenance
With control panel settings being adjusted and fans and AMUs working overtime, it’s crucial to keep up with your paint booth maintenance throughout the summer. Before and after the season, we recommended scheduling an inspection to ensure your equipment is set up properly for the warm weather and doesn’t have any red flags after the summer ends. In the event that your paint booth starts to experience mechanical or performance issues due to overheating, call Accudraft right away. Our emergency service team is available to immediately repair your equipment to minimize your shop’s downtime.
Contact Accudraft online to learn more about our maintenance plans.