A paint respirator is an important part of job site safety. Job completion is your top priority. You’re busy. And wearing a respirator is not your first priority.
But stop, breathe and think for a minute.
If you’re employing people who paint, you are responsible for the health and safety of your employees, including controlling hazards in the workplace and making sure your people wear personal protective equipment like respirators.
If you’re a painter, do the right thing for yourself and wear a respirator to protect your lungs from exposure. Because even though many paints and coatings meet the most stringent VOC regulations, inhaling chemicals and hazardous dusts can still occur.
Start with air monitoring
Begin with knowledge about your potential exposure and what you might be up against. Air monitoring can help quantify concentrations. This could include monitoring for dust or for certain chemical components in paint products. It could also include specific hazards like lead, mold or asbestos in renovation work.
How do you go about monitoring your work environment? There are a number of different ways to go about it, including contacting OSHA Consultation (NOT the enforcement side of OSHA) to bring someone out to monitor the air and provide guidance, going through a third-party Industrial Hygiene consultant to conduct the air sampling, going through your risk insurance company, or you could even do it yourself if you are competent in industrial hygiene sampling methods.
A mask or a respirator?
This is a common question, but the difference between a mask and a respirator is extremely important. A “mask” does not keep fine dust out of your lungs. Masks have not undergone any government filtration performance testing. They keep the larger particles out of your mouth.
In contrast, a respirator has filter media and forms a tight seal to the face to reduce your exposure to airborne particulates. To be called a “respirator,” the filtering facepiece must be NIOSH approved and state the NIOSH rating (such as N95) on the product.
Picking the right paint respirator
The choice between a disposable filtering facepiece respirator and a reusable cartridge respirator relates back to your exposure assessment and what kind of protection you need. So, make sure you understand what hazards you’ll be exposed to for a particular job.
Disposable Paint Respirator
When you hear the term “disposable respirator,” think protection against particle exposures, not chemical exposures. Some disposable respirators do offer a layer of carbon in the media to help reduce exposure to some odors, but it’s not enough carbon to deal with chemical exposures that are exceeding OSHA’s Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs).
Disposable respirators tend to be more comfortable than their reusable counterparts because of their lighter construction. In addition, they cost less, require no maintenance and are simply thrown away at the end of their service life.
Reusable Paint Respirator
When you’re dealing with chemical exposures that exceed OSHA’s Permissible Exposure limits (PELs), select a reusable respirator with the appropriate chemical cartridge. Reusable respirators are versatile since they offer the option of choosing a particle filter or chemical cartridge.
Chemical cartridges contain activated carbon to help reduce exposure to a variety of different chemical types, depending on the NIOSH approval rating.
The carbon inside the cartridges is treated for different chemical types. Therefore, a variety of chemical cartridge options are designed for specific applications. The color codes identify each cartridge type (see chart below).
Common Cartridge Color Designations
Table could not be displayed.Some cartridges allow you to add a particulate prefilter, so you can help filter out both particulates and gases/vapors. Reusable respirators also have the option of using particulate filters only which can attach to the reusable facepiece directly.
Reusable respirators require regular maintenance and cleaning and have a higher initial cost than disposables. However, they may save money in the long run. For example, simply replace the cartridges and filters then reuse the facepiece.
When properly fit and sealed to the face, a disposable respirator and a half facepiece reusable respirator offer the same level of protection for the worker. In addition, OSHA has assigned them both a protection factor of 10. So, this means they protect against particulate contaminant concentrations up to ten times the occupational exposure limit.
So Amigos, do you have any other suggestions when it comes to respirators? Share below…
Also, check out Paint Amigo’s respirator recommendations below (Amazon affiliate links)…
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