I’m considering a spray booth in my laundry room and venting it using the dryer vent. Any input on that idea? Thanks!
As long as you have a strong enough fan to move the fumes through the vent, it could work. You’ll still get some fumes floating around the room no matter what you do (keep the door closed so it won’t settle around the rest of the house, and wear a breathing mask), but good ventilation should help.
Be careful that the fumes can not flow back into the dryer and then into the room - particularly with a gas dryer that has a pilot light. Conversly, damp air from the dryer could backflow into the spray booth. I think it would be safer to have a dedicated vent for the spray booth if you can get permission to cut another hole in the wall for it. Get a fan where the motor is not in the air flow as this could ignite the paint fumes. I use a Dayton fan.
I wouldn’t. Take the hose off at the wall - see all that lint? Look in the vent outward - more lint. That lint is going to block air flow reducing the efficiency of the booth. Also if it’s hooked to the vent full time, lint will be blown back towards the booth and eventually into it. Not a good thing unless you model the Dust Bunny Ry with 3D paint.
A dryer vent to the outside is OK. maybe you can add another. Not too hard to install and wouldn’t look to bad.
On side note, I like my Paasche 22-16 booth from a vendor on Flea Bay… under $200 delivered
ratled
Are you going to be disconnecting the vent line from the dryer and connecting it to the booth discharge every time? Or are you thinking of putting a tee in the vent connection? If you put a tee in, the fumes will end up in the dryer, and the dryer exhaust will end up in the spray booth.
And what is the material of the vent line. Is it a solid metal pipe type, or one of those springy things with a plastic covering? The plastic covered ones will deteriorate quickly if you are using solvent based paints.
Another concern is that sometimes the dryer discharge filter doesn’t stop everything and you end up with lint in the vent line. If you use solvent based paint the lint could conceivably end up trapping some of the solvent over spray, leading to a potential fire hazard.
SWMBO will probably object. She will fear her clean wash will come out smelling of lacquer thinner.
A number of years ago I built a spray booth and used an in-line bathroom exhaust fan to vent it. I haven’t used it for years but plan to start using it again. Obviously I need to replace the exhaust fan with a fan with its motor outside the air flow. Where can I find info. on the Dayton exhaust fan mentioned in one of the above posts? What size did you use and for what size spray booth?
Thanks,
Bob
If you see this inside your vent line, it’s also decreasing the effiency of your dryer. Maybe you should consider periodically cleaning or replacing such restricted hoses.
I’ve used this type setup for years. My dryer has a Vent Saver, a two way valve that allows the warm humid (and somewhat linty) air to be sent back into the room or basement, wherever your dryer is located. It also decreases the efficiency of the dryer, so I haven’t used it for quite a while, but it gives me a convienent place to “tap in” the vent line from my paint booth. The booth is on casters, so I just roll it over in front of the dryer, pull the hose off the top of the vent saver and connect it to the tube from my paint booth.
As far as the fan motor, any brushless motor will be fine since the brush to commutator will be what gives off sparks. Mine uses a bathroom vent fan with a light mounted in the center. You never have enough light when painting. As always, wear a respirator appropriate to the type paint you’ll be spraying.
Good questions everyone. I was thinking about a tee with a “diverter valve” in it. The dryer itself is an electric dryer, so the gas pilot won’t be a concern. And the existing dryer exhaust is the 4 inch galvanized thinwall steel pipe.
What I could do is put a tee in the line and cap it, only hooking up the exhaust from the spray booth when I was using it. In that case I’d connect to the permanent vent with a flexible aluminum line as needed.
Next question…don’t the commercial spray booths, like the one advertised in this months Walther’s flyer, have a fan built into them? The idea of using the dryer vent was based on the spray booth having a fan built into it. No fan and I don’t think it’d push the paint fumes out the 10 - 12 foot run of dryer vent line.
Another way of venting a spray booth is to positive pressure the room. A fan and filter is mounted in a wall either an outside wall or an inside wall of a larger room. The fan blows air into the room and is exhausted by the spray booth vent. The doors and windows of the room need good weatherstrip sealing to keep the proper venting. This way the fumes are not drawn through the fan. The room air is exhausted to the outside. The outlet should be as far away from the fan intake as possible.
Pete
Maybe Art Hill will pop in on this…I understand he hacked a booth together using a range hood as the starting point. Fan and light already in place. Does the 10-12 foot run mean it’s too difficult to run a second vent out?
Gary
The Dayton fans/blowers are available from Granger; they are industrial grade products so may be more expensive but will last a lifetime. I got my Dayton blower back in the late 1980s, and it still runs with no problems. My model 4C447, 265 CFM blower is discontinued; the closest one I see is 1TDR3 at 273 CFM. This is a sort on Dayton 115V blowers from Granger:
The list includes high temp and 2-speed which I could not filter out; these are not needed and are more expensive.
My spray booth has an opening 23" wide by 21" high. To size the blower, there is a formula of X CFM per square foot (or inch) of opening. I do not rember the specifics, maybe someone else does.
Another thing to consider if you are building a spray booth is the filter size. If you plan to use a furnace filter, check local hardware stores to see what they stock. When built mine, I used the size filter from the plans which is not available. I have had to buy and cut down larger filters.
The only maintenance I do is to vacuum out the paint dust from the booth from time to time. A couple of time a year, I take a small blade screwdriver and lightly scrape the paint dust from the blower blades. It increases the effencicy of the blower. The paint dust falls into the bottom of the blower, so I just turn on the blower and blow the dust out the vent - another reason not to connect to a dryer vent.
The second vent is problematic due to my other half. If that wasn’t the case, a permanently installed spray booth with a dedicated vent would be what I’d be installing.
Do you have a basement with window wells to let light in from the outside? Our dryer is in the basement. The window well windows were in two panes. The dryer vent to the outside was accomplished by removing one of the pans and installing a flat aluminum piece which had an appropriately sized hole for the typical outlet vent assembly. Copying that, I installed a similar assembly in the other window well and connected my spray booth outlet to it.