Paint Overspray Removal

If you own a car or truck there’s a good chance you’ve run into a situation where you need paint overspray removal car detailing services. At Auto Beauty Center, we specialize in paint overspray removal car detailing and can get your vehicle back to its pristine condition.

Car Detailing – What is paint overspray?

Paint overspray generally concerns unintentionally applying paint or a similar coating to a surface that wasn’t the original target. In other words, you accidentally created a mist of paint spray that floated away and landed on nearby cars, houses, and buildings.

For obvious reasons, it’s not a great situation to be in if you are the person that created the overspray. And for reference, even though we are focusing on paint and related coatings, overspray can occur anytime you spray a liquid chemical in the air.

Common Sources of Paint Overspray

If you need some ideas on where to look, the following list is a good place to start. Just remember, on windy days paint overspray can travel a fairly good distance before drying and falling to the ground.

Bridge painting projects. Look for white tarp wrapped bridges. They use industrial epoxy coatings that stick to anything.
Construction site and large office building painting. They also use epoxies that aren’t clearcoat friendly. The wind up there moves fast.
Painting Water Towers. Most hold a million or more gallons and are hard to tarp for painting. Both the insides and outsides are painted with heavy zinc primer and two coats of epoxy paint.
Residential home exterior painting. Never underestimate the power of one painter with a spray gun. They can overspray an entire neighborhood in less than a few hours. Wooden decks and porches. The double whammy of epoxy deck stains and polyurethane sealers. Looks like tree sap, but sticks to anything.
Tree Sap. If you see something that looks like hard, sticky syrup on your car, look above and you will most likely see the tree that caused it.
Road paint and highway line paint. Highway paint is called hot melt marking paint and it’s sprayed on roads after heating it to 392 degrees (Fahrenheit). Road paint removal is fairly difficult to do as a DIY project at home.

Will My Auto Insurance Cover Paint Overspray Damage?

According to insurance claims experts, more than 1,000 vehicles a day are damaged with paint overspray, resulting in damage claims in excess of $500 million annually. The problem with quoting statistics is that they don’t always give the full picture. If a professional painter causes overspray damage to your car, they are usually liable to pay for damages.

However, there’s the little problem of actually getting paid. Unfortunately, not all painters carry insurance. It’s expensive. So to make these policies affordable, some companies offer cut-rate discount contractor insurance. So some painters have insurance that excludes paint overspray claims to keep the premium costs affordable.

Even if a painter does have paint overspray coverage, many insurance companies now include per claim deductibles above $500. This means the painter will be paying out of pocket up to $500 per car. Unfortunately, you might have to pay your deductible or the full cost of the paint overspray removal.

How much does it cost to remove overspray?

The typical cost to remove paint overspray from a vehicle ranges in price from a low of $150 to a high of $500 or more. These rates are standard for professional car detailing or reconditioning techs. The price you pay will greatly depend on the size of the vehicle, the severity of the overspray damage, and where it’s located on the vehicle.

For example, is it just the windshield or is it covering the entire vehicle? And if it’s everywhere, is it a Kia compact or a Yukon Denali XL SUV? Obviously the price points will be wildly different depending on those types of differences.

Another criteria that often affects car detailing overspray removal prices, is the type of surface. Removing paint overspray from glass windows is measurably less difficult than removing it from body paint or plastic trim.

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