Paint Your Ceilings Fast With An Airless Paint Sprayer

Hey out there again, Pro Calgary Painters here again. Do you want to know how to spray with an airless paint sprayer? Maybe you're thinking about renting one if you got a big job or not. I'm going to give you a little rundown on it. They're not really that hard. We're not going to show you every detail because each airless spray painting machine is a little bit different, but I'm going to give you some pointers show you how it works to help paint your ceilings fast with an airless paint sprayer.

And it's my goal as a 20+ year painting professional who owns his own business, and has a small team  of dedicated employees is to help you save time and save money on ceiling painting. It's my goal in this paint your ceilings fast with an airless paint sprayer blog post to pass on my knowledge, and my skills to you guys and do what we can to save you some hard ceiling painting labor. 

We often use our Cheap Calgary Painting interior website to help you guys learn how to tackle these projects yourself, save yourself some money, take pride in your workmanship, or what to talk about and watch out for if you are considering hiring in a painting contractor to complete the ceiling painting work for you. You should be aiming for high quality professional finished painting results. 

Our team is going to show you how to do it right. So if you like these kind of blog posts be sure to share it with all your friends. All right, first let's go over a few details about an airless. An airless paint sprayer is actually called an airless because it doesn't pump air into it. But the act of spraying, the material coming out of here the spray tip. 

Now you might hear it moves a lot of primer and paint from the paint bucket to the ceiling with minimal effort. Very similar to when you go to the car wash, and you spray it in, air goes everywhere, water goes everywhere. Well it's still doing a lot of air moving, so it must seem like it's not airless. But it's doing it simply by pumping the fluid under pressure through this tip. 

It often comes out of here to a PSI of a running 500 to 3,000 I forget the PSI exactly, but it's very high pressure. So number one, there's a safety concern. Never get your skin in front of this tip, because that can actually inject paint right under your skin, and be very dangerous. You can get in serious trouble so make sure you always treat this kind of like a gun. 

Don't walk around with your hand on the trigger if you're not prepared to spray, that would be safety number one. The parts to this gun are basically this. They call it a hand tight connector which means you should be able to loosen it by hand without tools. It doesn't require a ton of force so once you get it lined up pretty much where you want, you just hand tighten it. 

The other part to this is your tip now. These spray tips coming all kinds of different spray tip sizes and patterns. They're removable. Right, on to the tips. This green tip is what's called I believe it's called a fine finish tip, which there's another kind of fine finish for like spraying lacquers in, but this is for airless and latex paint. And what it does is it atomizes the paint a lot easier under lower pressure. 

This airless paint sprayer I have is about a $800 airless. The model is a ProX19, and it was like I say 8 or $900, but in that price range it can struggle a little bit. Airless sprayers. It's it's hard work for a new pump. This out right what was happening with mine was when I used a normal tip in here it was struggling to not give me tail 

Okay here's an illustration of what tails are. You see the normal pattern. Well tails are when you get basically these little tail streamers or lines out on the sides of the spray, and it can really ruin your paint job and the final finish. And that's usually caused by low pressure settings on the paint machine. And low pressure could be because you don't have the pressure knob turned up high enough. 

But often it's because you've got clogged filters, and there can be filters in your gun, and on the machine, or even at the suction intake, or it could be that you're using too big of a tip, which doesn't allow the machine to atomize it properly. Or your machine may even be too small, and you could be spraying something that's too thick for your machine. So there's a lot of variables here. 

But, if you got everything in good order, you usually just need to turn the pressure up. So anyway in order to avoid lines and tails in your spray painting finish make sure you got good pressure. I went to this tip here, which takes less pressure to atomize it, which means breaking it up into that fine pattern, and it has a little less overspray. 

It kind of comes out gentler. I think it sprays great. I love the tip myself, and it took away the problem with tails and lines, so this is a tip I would recommend. If you're renting an airless paint sprayer and have to buy it tip. Now if you rent one, one of the things to look for is the tip pattern, cuz if they give you a gun with a worn out tip, you can still use it like seasoned professional painters do, but it's going to use more paint, and it's not going to do as good a job. 

You may want to complain and get another tip. I'll show you tip patterns. Here okay, let me talk about this switchable tip. They call this a switchable tip. And one direction is spraying the nice fan pattern, but if you get a clog, which happens fairly often, you can turn this around, and it'll spray backwards,  which means the clogged particles or chunks or junk can be sprayed out of the plugged tip. 

Over here, now it'll just spray it out. So you do a quick burst, clean it up, switch back in your spray again. Okay let me explain tip sizes. You notice the one on the left says 210. The one on the right is 516. That is the tip size. There's two parts to a tip size. So let's take the example of 210. The first part is two, which means at a normal spraying distance it will spray 4 in wide. 

The 10 is the opening size. So it has a smaller opening size than the 516. It's on a 516. It should spray about 10 inches wide, and will let more fluid or paint or primer or lacquer come out. Therefore you can either spray faster, or it will put it on heavier coat. I normally spray with about a 619 or 516. 519 somewhere in there. And that works good on big surfaces like ceilings and walls. The smaller tips are for like spraying trim work and things like that.

All right let me point out something about the airless tip. If you want it, there's a pressure setting on your sprayer. A lot of painters call it the pump, so check the pump pressure settings. And you do not want the highest pressure. The higher the pressure you spray at, The more overspray. It's going to atomize it more, and when it over atomizes, it you're just going to have fog, and it's just spray. 

So one way to check is to spray a test pattern on some masking like this. And I usually just do a little burst so like that, and then look at it. And you want this shape. You want it to be narrow, no tails on the end like I showed you earlier. And clean. And if you turn it down, and you start getting tails, that tells you that you went too low, then crank it back up a notch or two. 

That's usually about where you want it. If it feels like it's coming out too slow, you might turn it up a little bit more. If you see too much overspray, you can just feel like there's a fog everywhere. It's too high. So you'll kind of see when I spray there's not really that much fog going everywhere. So now when spraying I do highly recommend a full spraying gear. 

Because it'll get your paint color in your ears, on your face, and over over yourself. So I have this full suit. We usually get them at Cloverdale or Dulux paint stores. They are only a couple dollars each.  I've tried a lot of them that just rip really quickly, and they don't fit me. I'm 6'2, and I need a tall one, so this one fits me good. And then I absolutely love the ones with the hood. 

You can get a spray sock too, but often the spray sock leaves exposed gaps, and it just doesn't fit right. Just saying I put this up, and it covers everything that my mask doesn't. So I like to wear gloves, and I wet my gloves, and that makes it easier to if I need to wipe a little paint off something, maybe it drift or whatever. Wet gloves work better and it keeps my hands clean. 

So if any paint gets onto the gloves with wet gloves when I take them off, it just comes right off my hands. Basically covered head to toe. Now let's talk about the mask. You can get a simple respirator which is what is inside of this. It's a simple respirator, but this is a full face mask. Now they run about $100 plus, so if you're on a budget, you might want just this part, and just cover up as much as you can.

Wear some goggles, and you're going to end up with paint on you. There are products you can put on your skin that's supposed to make it come off easier. I've been spraying with a full face mask for so long I can't remember how I used to do it. We are painters so we paint a lot, but when I do these popcorn ceilings, I pretty much paint 90% of them ceilings.

And these things have a tear off face shield. So when they get really dirty, you can clean them over and over, but eventually it just comes to point where you're not seeing through it clear. Rip it off clean. This part underneath. Put a new one on, and you're good to go. And then these respirators have these interchangeable parts. There's a pre-filter right in here. 

That's good for capturing a lot of that mist that gets on, and then inside is the real filter. That'll last you quite a long time. It ain't got your pre filters. I just basically base it on if it starts getting hard to breathe. I change out the pre-filter, if that doesn't solve it, I need a new filter. And they just come on and off like that. So they're pretty simple to swap a new one out, and this part just pops off. 

In a pre-filters right in there, it's pretty easy to breathe in them. What sucks about it is they're going to get covered in paint while you're spraying. Even if you're trying to stay away from it, it's going to get a mist on it pretty soon. It gets harder and harder to see, so I keep a microfiber cloth nearby, and every now and then I go over and I'll use my wet gloves to wipe off the paint and then I microfiber polish it so I can see it again. 

So that's the safety gears talk. About the ceiling painting. Now most of us didn't grow up a painter. We found the trade, went to school, got trained, painted out thousands of new construction buildings and houses and homes along the way earning our red seal certification tickets, and learned a few save money and time tricks along the way.  

I'm spraying a primer today. That's about $50 for five gallons. It's a PVA drywall primer from Lowe's,  but let's get on to spraying. What you're trying to do when you spray is to get a 50% overlap on all your paint. So here's the little demo that I was talking about with 50%. You would go one pass there, and then starting right here, holding your gun roughly 12 to 14 inches away, you go another path. 

And I like to trigger, but not often. You might see some painters that do the constant spray. Those guys are really good. They've done it a lot. You can get away with it, but what happens is, every time you come to the end, you slow down. It'll get thicker on the ends, and you're trying to put this on as evenly as you can that's one reason you do 50% overlaps. 

It just puts it on more even. So again hold it about 12 inches away, move it at a steady speed, keep the speed the same all the time. Try not to speed up or slow down. Don't go and zigzag line. Asolutely do not do some kind of filler then pattern. Just needs to be a very distinct pattern this way 50%. This back and forth and you want to try and go from one wall to the other with primers. 

Not quite so critical, but what happens is if you don't, each time you come back, you get heavier right there on that overlap. You can't help it, and the heavier it is, the more likely it is to have a different gloss and it will give it away. You'll have these banding stripy looks, so it's best if you can go from wall to wall like the pro's typically do it, to get the best of the best results.

Now another way you can help even it out as you can. Back roll it. Which means take a roller loaded up with some paint, and real lightly roll it out a little bit on the ceiling. Because you just want to light load on that roller, and then have the airless guy start spraying. And you just roll over everything he does right behind him like like 30 seconds behind him. 

Stay out of the immediate spray, and that will help even things out. It will also give it a little roller stipple. 14 inches away and put it on as evenly as possible. And that'll basically cover an airless. Okay there is a slight mist in the air. They're always will be after this, but I'm going to stay over here. Didn't get enough in the air I can breathe this for a little bit, but I need to get my mask back on. 

Couple more pointers for you whenever you're spraying. You do the 12 to 14 inches, and go in the overlaps. But you also don't tilt your gun. When you tilt your gun to get further away, you get a wider pattern, and you get a lighter pattern. So in order to keep it even keep, your hand at a 90 degree angle. Always I prefer the triggering as you see right at the end. 

Just let go go again. I have a painted cars, I painted houses, so I'm pretty good at spraying pretty evenly. With a little bit of practice, and a couple dozen full ceilings painted with an airless paint sprayer, you should be a professional ceiling painter in no time. You might have noticed I went pretty fast. That's what professional ceiling painters and ceiling painting experts do. 

You normally don't go quite that fast. This is actually a prime coat for a texture I'm going to do. In order to do that ceiling texture, I needed the ceiling primed first. Forget rolling in a ceiling with primer. It takes hours. Spray paint your ceilings fast with an airless paint sprayer and you can easily spray in a couple of thousand square feet of ceiling space per hour. So we're going to do prime coat, and then texture it, and then we're going to prime it again. 

Thanks for stopping in and checking out our Calgary Painters blog post here about how to go about painting your ceilings fast with an airless paint sprayer. You will likely get the best of the best ceiling painting results by calling in a professional painter with lots of experience. You could call in the pros over at 1/2 Price Pro Calgary Painting by giving us a call @ (587) 800-2801. We can likely get you a same day painting price quote or painting estimate to paint your ceilings for you. Another option is to use the handy dandy contact us form or email us @ CheapCalgaryPainting@gmail.com.