Paint Sludge Removal Can Be Easy

Paint sludge removal is daunting. In the natural course of events, paint will always collect in your tanks, clog your plumbing, and lay the groundwork for microbial and bacteria issues. Sooner or later, you’re shutting down that line, starting up the pumps, and picking up the shovels.

Adding some sort of automated paint sludge removal will save you time, and a paint sludge dewatering stage will lower the cost of disposing of paint sludge deemed hazardous by regulators. But it’s hard to escape the “pump and shovel” approach. Chemistry-dependent flocculation-and-skimmer systems are notoriously finicky solutions, and most general-use centrifuges are ill-suited to the challenges of dewatering paint sludge.

And it’s hard to stay on top of contaminant levels in your poor water-wash paint booth filtration. Those contaminants degrade water curtain performance long before anything is obviously amiss in your tanks. This allows more paint overspray to escape into your exhaust systems and stacks. There, it gums up exhaust fans and potentially makes it out into the environment, where it wreaks havoc, and may even trigger EPA violations.

All of which is extremely expensive.

We’ve had clients who relied on “pump & shovel” filtration and were emptying their 12,000-gallon settling tanks at least once each month (if not more). Owing to the makeup of their paint, all of that effluent and sludge needed to be treated as hazardous waste. Disposal costs alone were $20,000 every time they pumped-and-shoveled (and that didn’t account in any way for increased labor and lost production time).

With the addition of a new CentraSep S-126 paint sludge separator, they’ve dropped from one to two dumps each month to one or two each year. The savings in disposal alone is calculated to be $160,000 per year. Once they factor in the reduced cost of labor, maintenance, chemistry, and downtime, they expect to save more than $200,000 annually.

Simple is Successful: CentraSep S-Series Centrifuges

On average, Trucent customers decrease tank cleanings from five or more per year down to a single routine annual cleaning. The secret to getting these results is the CentraSep S-Series centrifuge. This centrifugal separator is the only single-motor vertical-standing self-discharging centrifuge in the world, and is optimized for hassle-free paint booth filtration.

Most paint sludge separator centrifuges are complex. They rely on a pair of motors, which doubles the number of failure points–two drive trains, two motor controllers, a complex clutch–and exposes bearings to damaging contamination.

By keeping the part-count as low as possible, the CentraSep S-series packs high performance into extremely reliable equipment, requiring only standard maintenance. The S-series is built around a bottom-fed/bottom-discharge design driven by a single top-mounted motor. Bearings are shielded from contamination in a single-piece quick-change rotor assembly. The S-series’ precision-machined centrifugally cast bowl and unique positive-locking clutch prevent oscillation during operation, reducing wear and increasing efficiency.

The result is a paint-sludge separator that can reduce your chemical costs by as much as 70 percent. Facilities relying on chemistry-intensive skimmer-based filtration can make back the cost of a CentraSep S-series in under a year. For operations currently relying on labor-intensive and time-consuming “pump and shovel” solutions, that payoff period is generally under half a year and can be as little as three months, based just on the savings from reduced labor costs and downtime.

We Bring Expertise to You

Trucent is dedicated to a process-oriented approach. This has meant spending decades investing in a team composed of more than equipment experts and engineers. Our team brings together decades of experience with non-disposable media filtration, chemistry, centrifuges, fluid separators, and water-wash paint booth operations. We work with you to find the right intervention, use the right technology, and match it to the right application. And we can go one step further, with optional warranties and service plans, as well as ongoing parts and maintenance support—even your own dedicated on-site Trucent filter systems management team.

No one else offers this level of comprehensive service.

Every solution begins with a conversation. Contact us today to begin that conversation, or schedule a no-obligation on-site consultation. We’ll come to your site, walk your paint booth line, take samples back to our labs for further analysis, and find a better way to keep your paint booths running smoothly.