Advantages of Using an Airless Sprayer

Most of us have experienced painting with a brush, even if the last time we used one was back in high school art! But if you’re keen on DIY, you actually get faster results with an airless sprayer - for a lot less effort. 

Airless sprayers are the happy medium between tedious brush work and hiring a professional painter.

Let’s look at how an airless sprayer works, and the advantages of hiring one rather than sticking with a brush or roller.

Spray painting vs brush and roller

The tedium of using a brush to paint was overcome with rollers, which hold more paint and cover more surface area. But rollers still require physical effort, careful application of paint to roller, and the hassles of spillages and paint getting on the painter!

Enter the airless sprayer. When set up correctly, spray painting minimises waste, since there is no paint left on a roller or brush, and you get more even coverage with each pass, which results in a professional finish.

How an airless sprayer works

Unlike high volume low pressure (HVLP) sprayers, which store paint in a canister and mix it with compressed air to atomise it into a spray, airless sprayers use a piston to pressurise the paint itself within the machine. The paint comes out of the nozzle under much greater pressure than an HVLP sprayer.

Because the paint itself is pressurised, there’s no need to use as much thinner as you would with an HVLP sprayer; in some cases, thinner won’t be needed at all. This means the paint from an airless sprayer is thicker, covers surfaces better and dries quicker.

Want to watch how to use an airless sprayer? Check out our video below.

The speed advantage

Using a sprayer, you can get a large surface area completed far more quickly than with a brush or roller. That’s because the paint reaches every nook and cranny. There's also no need to go back and touch up areas the brush or roller missed.

If you are painting a fiddly object such as a lattice frame or a fence, the sprayer will cover all the crevices just by shifting the nozzle angle so the paint gets in sideways as well as up and down. There’s no danger of “missing” one of the inside edges and only finding out after you’ve cleaned up.

On large, flat surfaces such as exterior walls, the airless sprayer can paint just about as fast as you can smoothly walk along. This imparts that smooth finish that people associate with a professional paint job.

Then there’s the ease with which you set up: the sprayer’s intake hose goes directly into the paint tin. You don’t have to fill a canister and thin the paint down; you just take the lid off the paint and insert the hose.

And while a professional airless sprayer might be too much of an investment to buy, you can hire one and get some free advice at the same time from your local Kennards Hire team.