7 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Portable Spray Booth

Are your outsourced coating and painting operations eating into your bottom line? A portable spray booth could be a cost-effective solution to bring your finishing in house, such as a retractable paint booth that can move with your workflows. Plus, bringing finishing in house can reduce your lead times and give you more oversight for quality control.

But investing in a spray booth system involves capital expenditure, floor space allocation, potential plant reconfiguration, possible construction permits and regulatory compliance issues. You’ll need a vendor who understands the challenges you face and who has built a product that anticipates and addresses those issues.

Here are some useful questions you can use to qualify industrial spray booth manufacturers to find the right partner and product to help you get a discernible return on your booth investment.

1. What sizes do your industrial spray booths come in?

Some vendors offer standard-sized booths, but you may want to consider a partner who will custom-build portable spray booths to fit the size of your products. These custom solutions can be as large as you need them while huge booths present two major logistical challenges.

For one, you have to make sure you can get your products into the paint booth — a process that often involves time-consuming and costly material handling, especially in cases involving oversized products. Second, you will have to subtract that square footage from the total floor space in your shop available for other processes.

Duroair custom-engineers portable paint booths to solve both of these issues. Extend them to envelop a product when finishing and then retract them to 20% of their extended lengths when painting is complete, storing them away.

2. What sorts of materials are your portable spray booths made of?

Most industrial paint booth manufacturers build their booths with steel framing and cladding. This makes them enduring and fireproof but also completely immobile.

Duroair retractable paint booths and clean-air enclosures, on the other hand, are made using heavy steel framing surrounded by 16-mil industrial-grade vinyl coated in a fire-resistant additive. This combination allows for the enclosures to fold up to a fraction of their extended sizes, delivering both the durability and flexibility an efficient finishing operation needs.

3. Are construction permits required?

Most paint booths will require construction permits — not only for the permanent booth installation, but also for the supporting venting and contaminant collection systems. This adds costs and potential other risks, such as project delays.

A Duroair retractable spray booth can be combined with a DuroPure™ non-vented air recycling system. This combination works exclusively inside a shop with a self-contained paint booth filter system, avoiding the need to vent to the outside and to install a supplemental system for collecting and storing contaminants. In most cases, it also eliminates the need for new construction permits.

4. What is your lead time to custom-build a portable spray booth?

Industrial paint booth manufacturers will typically require 8–12 weeks to manufacture a custom order. Shipping and delivery will then take between 1–2 weeks for a total lead time of 9–14 weeks, plus installation.

By way of contrast, a custom, Duroair, portable spray booth can be produced inside of 6 weeks and shipped door-to-door in 1 week for a total of 7 weeks, plus installation.

5. How long will it take to install your product?

Once a permanent industrial paint booth arrives at its destination, it typically takes 1–4 weeks to install. That means significant downtime in designated areas of a plant — and potentially throughout the entire plant.

Duroair’s portable spray booths, on the other hand, can be installed within a week. Some of our smaller systems have been installed in just two to three days day and under a week is typical.

6. How will your portable spray booth increase the quality of my product?

Portable spray booths can potentially increase the quality of the products that are finished in them in many ways. Some have advanced lighting systems that increase operators’ visibility, for example. But the outcomes that matter the most are more even curing and faster dry times. These inevitably depend on the airflow within the booth, which can be manipulated through the incorporation of a wind system.

Duroair’s spray booths are engineered with patented tapered-draft airflow technology, which keep airflow speeds close to the 100 ft. per minute mark as air makes its way from the paint booth’s intake to its exhaust — a feature that is particularly important in longer booths designed for oversized products.

7. What is the ROI?

The answer to this important question is always going to depend on your particular application for your portable spray booth. However, bottom-line areas that spray booths can affect directly in almost all shops — and which industrial spray booth manufacturers should be able to speak to — include speeding up production timelines and reducing material handling costs.

Schedule Your Next Interview With a Portable Spray Booth Manufacturer

Talking to portable spray booth manufacturers to find the right partner and product is a crucial part of the vendor qualification process. To try out some of these questions and to see if Duroair can provide the solution you need, please request a consultation with a Duroair clean air expert today.