Spray Paint Booths: 5 Crucial Safety Checks to Perform After Lockdown inc Spray Booth Filters

Spray Booth, Spray Booth Filters: 5 Crucial Safety Checks to perform. Author - Andy Potts June 9th 2020 (reading time 4 mins)

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spray booth filters

If you're preparing to reopen your paint shop after a period of non use or lockdown, you will need to ensure that the workplace is a safe environment for your employees. For sites that operate a spray booth, that means performing five crucial health and safety checks before resuming production.

The five key areas to check are:

  1. Filters
  2. Water wash booth tank
  3. Air-flow
  4. Booth walls and floors
  5. Shared equipment

Let's look at each point in detail.

  1. Spray booth filters

Are your filters clogged? If they are, it's time for a change of mindset. Spray booth filter systems require careful management. When they are clogged, dust and harmful chemical particles build up in your booth. This is problematic for several reasons:

  • Ineffective extract filters expose your painters to harmful vapours and gases, breaching health and safety regulations.
  • Clogged inlet filters allow contaminants to enter the enclosure, which compromises the quality of your paint finish.
  • A poorly maintained filtration system reduces the lifespan of your spray booth.

For further Spray Booth Filter info check out our video

What should you do?

  1. Change your filters now, before work commences. You can buy them here.
  2. Routinely check and change your filters every three weeks (workload dependent) as part of your maintenance schedule.

A note on when to change your spray booth filters

How often you need to change your filters can vary between 100 and 250 running hours, depending on your filter type and usage. In practice, this means that you may need to change your filters as often as fortnightly. As a minimum, we advise you to schedule in at least three changes between your main spray booth service intervals.

Sticking to a schedule is cost-effective

When you delay filter changes, your overspray extraction becomes less efficient, and this causes defects in your paintwork. Given that having to redo a paint job is usually more costly than a set of new filters, it makes financial sense to have a filter change schedule in place and stick to it. Our Total Paint Shop Support Team can help you with that. Contact usfor details of our automatic order renewal service.

Take A Look At Our Video On The Importance Of A Quality Paint Finish

  1. Water Wash Spray Booth Tank

If your water wash spray booth tank smells offensive, it needs a deep clean! When left untreated, water wash tanks make the perfect breeding ground for a variety of anaerobic bacteria that can cause biological odours, compromise booth performance and cause harm to your workers.

View our video on Water Wash Booth Systems

Biological Odours

Biological odour does more than cause a bad smell; it damages your booth too. As the bacteria breeds, it plugs up back sections, spray heads and other water booth components with corrosive deposits.

This can lead to premature component failure, poor paint finishes and high maintenance costs.

Legionella bacteria

Untreated water tanks are a haven for Legionella bacteria, which can cause Legionnaires' disease - a life-threatening illness. The bacteria require a particular set of conditions to be able to survive:

  • A water temperature range of between 20 and 45C - temperatures above 50C will kill Legionella bacteria, but water below 20C will only cause it to hibernate until temperatures are optimal again.
  • A food source - organic nutrients and bacteria present in stagnant water and sludge.
  • A means of spreading - humans become infected with Legionnaires' via breathable droplets of contaminated water.

Stagnant water in water wash spray booth tanks provides these conditions.

What should you do?

  1. Deep clean your tank immediately- use 'shock dosage' denaturant and biocide additive.
  2. Maintain a routine cleaning regime - add additive weekly to keep bacteria locked away.

Buy it now

spray booth biocide

 

spray booth denaturant

 

 

Gramos Denaturant Tak Kill

 

Gramos Biocide Additive

 

3. Air-flow

 

When did you last carry out a LEV test in your paint shop? COSHH regulations require that employers thoroughly examine and test LEV systems annually.

Managing air-flow and extraction is essential to prevent dust and contaminants from finding their way into your paint job and your painters' lungs.

 

  1. Booth walls & floors

If you haven't cleaned your booth walls and floor in a while, the build-up creates the ideal environment for harmful bacteria to thrive.

What should you do?

  1. Clean the booth thoroughly now, before work commences.
  1. Spray walls and floor with a suitable peelable coating. This method of surface protection makes the mundane job of booth cleaning a great deal easier, cutting maintenance time by up to 70%.
  2. Peel off and dispose of the coating and reapply every 3-4 months, depending on usage type and levels.

Buy it now

For walls:

gramos propeel

 

 

gramos propeel

 

 

Gramos Propeel Peelable Coating

 

 

Gramos Aquapeel (25 Litre)

Gramos Aquapeel Ultra (25 Litre)

 

For windows and lights:

spray booth propeel for floors

 

 

spray booth 3m dirt trap

 

 

Gramos Propeel CL (25 Litres)

 

 

 

spray booth gramos peelable hd

 

 

Gramos Propeel HD (25 Litre)

  1. Shared equipment

Workplace sanitation protocols will be a critical part of curbing the spread of COVID-19 for the foreseeable future. Scientists don't yet know precisely how long Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, can survive outside the human body.

However, studies on other similar coronaviruses found they can survive on metal, glass and plastic surfaces for up to nine days unless they are adequately disinfected. Needless to say, the new paint shop mantra should be "If you touch it, sanitise it."

What should you do?

  1. Put a sanitisation protocol in place: issue your painters with a suitable hand sanitiser and instruct them to clean any shared kit or spray booth control panels after they have used it.
  2. Make it easy for your workforce to adhere to your sanitisation protocol: provide your team with personal hygiene packs and mobile cleaning stations to make compliance easy and to show them that you care about their safety.
  3. If your work area is large, you may want to spray the entire workshop to give your workforce peace of mind: reduce the pressure of your Graco HVLP, and 'airless spray' the sanitiser around the paint shop.
  • 1x box of 100 disposable black nitrile painters gloves (S, M, L, XL)
  • 1 x blue paper roll
  • 1 x spirit cloth roll
  • 1 x pack of 48 antibacterial hand wipes
  • 1 x 500ml easy flip top alcohol hand gel

Need More Help?

If you can’t find a fix for the issue you’re experiencing or you need more advice, drop us a line and we’ll get your paint job on track.

 

 

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For further information on Jotun systems or specification products and which you should be using contact us below.

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