Michael Dresdner

Q: How big a fan will I need for a garage shop spray booth.
A: Though they have no legal sway in a garage shop, OSHA mandates 100 cfm (cubic feet per minute) per square foot of filtered booth wall, and in my opinion, those are good guidelines to follow. In other words, if you have a 2 foot square filter in front of a fan the same size, going out a window, you will want at least 400 cfm of air moving through it. A six foot square area wants 3600 cfm.
Choose your fan size or filtered wall size by the size of your booth and the amount of spraying you will do. Also, make sure you have enough clean intake air coming in to replace what is blowing out. I generally like three times as much filtered surface for my intake as is in my outgoing booth, to make sure you don’t overtax the fan motor.
By the way, make sure you don’t have anything on the other side of the outgoing fan. Even with filtering, it’s not unusual to get overspray on that car parked in your driveway, and I doubt you want that.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under fire safety, spray. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.