What’s the Difference Between a Single Skin and Dual Skin Paint Booth?

When it comes to single vs dual skin paint booths, there is a difference in construction and performance. Single skin paint booths are made of one singular sheet of steel, while dual skin booths have two layers of sheet steel between a non-flammable rock or mineral wool insulation.

Some paint booths coming out of different countries have been known to carry styrofoam in between the panels, which is cheaper to manufacture, but is a code violation. Styrofoam can pose a potential hazard to anyone in the case of excessive heat or fire. It’s tough to know what is between the walls of a paint booth without ripping them open, but your manufacturer should be able to tell you this immediately. Styrene, polystyrene, and eps are all names for styrofoam; they are all highly combustible and should never be used between the walls of a paint booth.

Single skin and dual skin paint booths perform very much the same. The heat loss from a single wall paint booth is minimal but the dual skin design of a paint booth is designed more so to protect the workspace outside the paint booth than to keep all the heat in for efficiency purposes. A dual skin paint booth keeps the area next to the paint booth cool and relatively undisturbed while the booth is in process. Simply put, the single wall booth will radiate its temperatures into the shop and the dual skin paint booth will not.

In terms of efficiency losses, they are negligible between dual skin and single skin. Remember, you are rushing so much heated air through the cabin that the heated air is doing the brunt of the work. The radiant heat, while yes, technically leaving the system in terms of physics, will make no practical difference on how fast that job cures in the paint booth.