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I got one of the spray booths of Amazon for Xmas and it comes with a hose that connects onto the back. The booth fits perfectly in the space where I want to use it without the hose, but won’t if I attach the hose.

Am I correct in thinking the hose is only required if you need to extract harmful fumes, for example if I was using rattle cans. Then I could put the exhaust outside. But if I am only airbrushing acrylic paint then I don’t need the hose as I just need the filter to catch the dust???

Thanks

Depends how safety-conscious you are really. You can definitely get away just fine spray water-based acrylics indoors, especially if you wear a proper respirator while doing it.

> n.b. As long as you are not spraying artist-grade stuff with heavy metal pigments like Cadmium

If I was just looking to catch the overspray, then I would be comfortable airbrushing indoors with acrylics in an un-powered booth without air extraction. I would still probably want to wear a respirator during spraying if I was doing anything heavy-duty like priming or basecoating a vehicle.

It’s the organic solvents like you can get in enamels or lacquer paints that are the nasty stuff, but I’m sure you’ll get some people who will tell you not to airbrush anything without air extraction.

Hi, to clarify the extraction fan will still be running but just won’t have the hose attached, so it will be sucking the particles into it it’s just a question where the filtered air goes

I think it's up to you to decide whether you're happy inhaling what doesn't get filtered. The filter only filters particulates, and it doesn't do a particularly good job of that anyway on most of the cheap spray booths I've seen.

You can also wear a mask, but that doesn't protect your eyes. I had a friend who decided to spray acrylic primer on car body panels in a booth when the fan wasn't working, he wore a mask but afterwards the whites of his eyes were faintly coloured the same colour as the primer. That's obviously a super extreme example, but it's worth being aware that your eyes are capable of absorbing stuff.

Even if you had the hose on it leading to a window, I've found my cheap spray booth barely pulls hard enough to suck the atomised cloud out of the booth as fast as I'm spraying it into the booth, and if there's a wind coming at the window the booth's fan will not win and it'll push air backwards through the fan. I replaced the fan in mine with something much beefier, though I was using mine to spray enamels and lacquers so I wanted that stuff out the window rather than relying on my mask.

You can look up the SDS of paints you're working with, they're definitely not all created equal, some have chemicals that haven't been sufficiently tested to know if they're safe, some might have cadmium or cobalt or known unsafe things (though that's getting increasingly rare, if you have an older set of paints it might have that stuff in it and not even tell you).

Personally I've always felt the best approach to safety is to not screw around and just get the cloud of dust/paint/vapours away from me so I don't have to worry about whether my mask is going to work. I know too many people who have screwed their health in one way or another due to exposure to stuff that they were ignorant could harm them. But that's me, other people will approach things differently.