Anyone in the repair industry knows the paint booth can be both your biggest asset and largest constraint. They’re one of the most important parts of your shop’s cycle and can directly impact cycle time and throughput. However, not every shop prioritizes paint booth efficiency as much as they should.
It’s understandable to an extent. It can be difficult to know how much time your paint booth is losing or gaining you depending on your setup. Beyond that, it’s also challenging to hone in on whether workflow management issues are the cause or result of an inefficient paint booth.
Nonetheless, upgrading your paint booth and increasing its efficiency is absolutely worth the time and money it will take. Like everything else in your shop, it’s an investment. However, it’s one of the most important investments in your entire business.
How To Make Your Paint Booth More Efficient
Reluctance to change is one of the biggest issues repair shops run into. It can be difficult for anyone to look into an upgrade, see the price, and justify to themselves the cost– especially if business is doing well enough. However, the paint booth bake cycle has proven time and again to be one of the biggest constraints on shops.
Depending on the set up, a single car can take a day or two for priming, water-based application, drying, clear-coating, and polishing. So, when it comes to your shop’s workflow, a paint booth’s efficiency can be the difference between three and six cars a day– and how much more money would you shop make with even just one more car a day?
Tips On How To Make Your Paint Booth More Efficient
- Make Sure You Change Your Filters Regularly
- Prioritize Regular Maintenance
- Make Use Of The Technology You Have Available
- Upgrade How You Dry Your Paint
- Consider The Layout Of Your Shop And How It Could Impact Workflow
Make Sure You Change Your Filters Regularly: How To Make Your Paint Booth More Efficient
According to Fender Bender’s, Travis Bean, representatives at Garmat agree that filters play a key role in your paint booth efficiency. In fact, changing your filters regularly is vital for operations to run smoothly.
Exhaust filters can accumulate a whole slew of particles and impurities very quickly. So, if left unchecked, it can drastically reduce your paint quality and efficiency. However, unlike your paint booth intake filter, exhaust filters can be pretty challenging to monitor without some visual assistance. Luckily, companies, such as Garmat, provide manometers with their paint booths (which monitor the health and efficiency of your exhaust filters).
However, there are a variety of factors that also impact how often a filter should be changed. Firstly, the cleanliness of your shop can make all the difference. Beyond that, the amount of cars your shop goes through on a monthly basis can also play a key role (as well as the type of paint). It’s important to know there isn’t really an average you should follow since all shops are different. The amount of times you may need the filter changed could be completely different than the shop a few miles down the road. So, it’s a good idea to monitor your filters and figure out just how often your filters should be changed.
Regular filter change isn’t an extra expense. Rather, it’s an investment. As long as your filter is continuously taken care of, one key aspect of your paint booth efficiency is covered.
Prioritize Regular Maintenance: How To Increase Your Paint Booth’s Efficiency
As with anything in your repair shop, regular maintenance is an absolute must. The repair industry today relies– now more than ever– on their paint booths running at maximum efficiency. It’s not always viable to completely replace your paint booth (although, it’s never a bad idea if you can afford it), so scheduled maintenance has become increasingly important for your shop.
Companies, such as Garmat, provide customers with packages to guarantee annual service for the complex systems of your paint booth. They’ll perform inspections on all of your airflow systems on a yearly basis. However, it’s good to remember that it’s also on your shop to maintain the booth as well as you possibly can. If no one is cleaning the basic stuff on a regular basis, you may choose to opt into maintenance for more than once a year.
Make Use Of The Technology You Have Available: How To Increase Your Paint Booth’s Efficiency
Garmat’s paint booths do quite a bit in order to help shops keep their operations running efficiently. They have gauges that provide visual aids for technicians; however, their control panels also really help determine the state of all the machinery in the booth.
Knowing how many hours of painting your booth has been through since maintenance is pivotal to understanding when you should change filters and undergo further maintenance.
The technology in today’s paint booths is pretty incredible and can track anything from filters, average bake cycle hours, and how long different types of paint take to dry.
Upgrade How You Dry Your Paint: How To Increase Your Paint Booth’s Efficiency
With convection drying and electric infrared drying being the most common ways to dry paint, it can seem like there aren’t many options. However, for roughly a decade over in Europe, gas catalytic drying has become the definitive best way to reduce the paint booth bake cycle times for repair shops.
Companies, such as Gascat Dryers, can provide training, dryers, parts, and repairs all domestically. However, the biggest selling-point for gas catalytic dryers is that they can take a 90 – 100 minute drying process and cut it down to 16 – 30 minutes– all while reportedly saving shops up to $1,500 a month on natural gas usage.
Consider The Layout Of Your Shop And How It Could Impact Workflow: How To increase Your Paint Booth’s Efficiency
Depending on where your paint booth and other stations are located, you can run into quite a few problems. Your paint booth should always be clean, so if there’s dirt inside, it’s likely coming from somewhere on the outside. Look at where the booth is in relation to the other stations. If those areas produce a lot of dirt and other particles, consider moving things around.
You want to treat all of your areas as though they need to be as clean as your paint booth. However, we know it’s not always possible to constantly clean certain stations. Prioritize keeping areas that require regular cleaning together so you reduce the amount of impurities that can find their way into the paint booth.
Garmat Paint Booths: How To Increase Your Paint Booth’s Efficiency
At Garmat USA, we are all about production efficiencies both for your shop, and for our operation. We thrive on coming up with new methods to address the needs of our customers while meeting their budgets.
We are also dedicated to helping you save on your cost of operation. Garmat USA equipment is designed to reduce energy consumption, giving you the best possible return on your investment.
Every product and every improvement is developed with your business goals in mind- Lowering your operating costs and Increasing your production.
