Keith Hayward:

Filters: The cost effective link to profits

Hello, I am Keith Hayward of Servair Filters in Georgetown, better known as "The Filter Guy". I travel the Toronto area every day inspecting and detailing spray paint booths and prep stations for their unique filter requirements. In fifteen months on the road I have detailed hundreds of booths. I have seen everything from 50 year old cross draft booths right up to the newest and most expensive downdraft booths available.

One thing that I can say is, filters, save you time and make you money. After all it is about quality work and retained revenue, isn't it? Let me explain. If you are like the majority of the places I visit you are in the habit of pushing filters well past their useful life expectancy. There are two areas of concern.

One is, if your intake filters are over loaded you lose air flow and without 100 feet per minute of air flow you lose drying time. This can also create sagging which requires wet sanding and repainting, oh brother the headaches just keep on coming. Not to mention painter safety when the air flow drops below the 100 FPM, which is also a government regulation for safety.

Secondly, we get to the real loss of time and money and that is the dreaded dirty filter that lets dust get into the booth and hence into the paint. Every car you paint that requires compounding, buffing and labor after it is painted has just cost you money and lost production time. The average cost I find in the real world is about $60 per paint job. You have to take a man off of prepping another car to spend an average of one and half hours compounding, and buffing, and polishing, the car to present it to the owner to sign off on so you get the payment. Your cost includes labor, compound, wax, and polish, buffing pads, electricity, headaches, later deliveries, plus lost time on getting the next car ready and in the booth. To coin a well used phrase "you can pay me now or pay me later."

You see you pay for filters whether you change them or not. Let me give you a couple of common examples. A brand new Filtrair FF560 ceiling filter for a downdraft booth runs you from$400 to $1,200 depending upon the booth. This filter is excellent and dust free for about 1000 booth running hours. How many dusty paint jobs does it take to pay for that filter? Only about 6 or 16 aforementioned clean ups and you have paid for the filter. Do not throw your money away and loss productivity time, get clean filters and bank the savings.

I will be producing a series of these "Filter Guy" articles for Collision Repair magazine. Do yourself and your company a favor and do not just read my articles but read this whole magazine and you will find many tips to make your business more successful and profitable, plus reduce your headaches. Until my next article, keep on spraying.

Keith Hayward aka "The Filter Guy" is a collision center specialist call him anytime at Servair filters 90-702-1221 or better yet he is almost always on the road so call his cell phone at 416-801-5218 to save you money and guarantee the best and proper fitting filters for your spray paint booth.