How to Choose a Welding Booth: EVERYTHING There Is To Know.

I’m going to assume that if you ended up here, you already know you need a Welding Booth. You’ve got a business, school or other facility with a bunch of people welding, and you need to keep your welders (and everyone nearby) safe from all the welding flashes, smoke, and flying debris that fabricators create all day, every day.

The problem is, there are a lot of welding booth vendors, and it gets confusing. So, as the CEO of a welding table and welding booth manufacturing company – that also employs a bunch of fabricators and deals with these problems every day – I wanted to try and download all of my knowledge on this subject into one spot in case it’s of general use to anyone else. To be clear, this isn’t a fluff piece written by a marketing department – it’s worse. I’m going to give you way more detail than you ever asked for! Sorry in advance. But if you print this out and take it to bed, it’ll probably put you to sleep.

Here’s a table of contents so you can jump to whatever part you need, and also to prepare you for what you’re about to be put through:

Codes and Standards That Actually Matter

Sorry, but before we get to all the other topics, you’ve gotta understand the legal requirements (in the USA) of what you better be providing – or you’re going to either get fined like crazy, or fined AND sued.

More importantly, we want our teams to be safe and healthy! And when it comes to welding the two most critical concerns are EYES and LUNGS. Welders make a habit of using their welding hoods judiciously when they are welding, but frequently don’t pay attention to people nearby. So the welding arc can damage nearby eyeballs. A MIG welding arc can put out visible light exceeding 170,000 lumens – more than 100 times the output of a 100 watt light bulb! However it also puts out equal amounts of ultraviolet and infrared energy, which the human eye can’t see, but which do as much or more damage! A few seconds of exposure can cause burns on the cornea. Longer exposure… well, let’s not go there.

As far as lungs are concerned, ALL welding fumes are carcinogenic to humans!! The primary harmful components can be broken down into two main categories: Particulate Fumes (metallic oxides) and Hazardous Gases.

• Particulate Fumes (The “Smoke”) – fine solid particles formed when vaporized metal cools and condenses. Primarily: iron oxides, manganese, silicon dioxides, chromium, nickel, manganese, aluminum oxide and ozone.
• Hazardous Gases – invisible gases generated by the arc’s interaction with the air, shielding gases, fluxes, and contaminants. Primarily: Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxides, Phosgene, Di-isocyanates, Ozone.

Welding booths that are doing their job should concentrate on blocking that harmful light from passers-by, while also containing and extracting those harmful fumes. So by definition a welding booth is going to need a fume extraction system. (More on that later.)

There are a few rules directly related to these issues. When it comes to EYE protection, there is one particular workplace safety standard that applies:

• ISO 25980 (curtains and screens): Defines attenuation and labeling for transparent welding curtains, strips, and screens.

For LUNG protection there are a few:

• OSHA General Industry 1910.252: If you rely on general mechanical ventilation instead of local exhaust at the source, plan a minimum 2,000 CFM per welder. Local exhaust hoods or booths change that requirement.
• OSHA Construction 1926.353: For jobsites and temporary setups, local exhaust must keep fume concentrations in the breathing zone within safe limits.
• ACGIH Industrial Ventilation: Use capture-velocity principles to size and position hoods, typically on the order of triple-digit feet-per-minute at the source depending on cross-drafts.

More broadly, I’ve also written an article about ALL of the OSHA regulations you might encounter in a typical fabrication shop.

Sizing the Booth and Laying Out the Cells

Thanks for bearing with me on that safety stuff. Now let’s dive into the meaty part. First of all, we need to determine what size welding booths we want. For a lot of you, this is really going to be dependent on the physical space you have to work with. And you might be tempted to think, “how many booths can I cram in there?” But that can be a mistake…

First of all, individual booths are are often 5×5 ft or 6×6 ft. These are the most common sizes for schools with welding programs. The booth is certainly big enough to accommodate a student and an instructor. And that’s because the students are typically just welding small coupons, or some pipe, or other learning projects. However, what you also often see is that more advanced students try to work on projects that simply won’t fit inside the booths, and then they move outside of them and start working in open areas – totally nullifying the money spent on the booths!

So, one strategy off the bat is to have smaller booths, as well as some larger ones for times when they are needed. But generally, I would advise getting booths that are a little oversized compared to whatever you think you’re going to be welding in them. Every fab shop I’ve ever seen ends up wanting to do bigger and better stuff over time, and if you’re welding booth won’t grow with you – you wasted a ton of money! Incidentally, this is why the welding booths that I designed, which we sell, are completely modular. So they can be reconfigured as needs evolve. But I digress…

You need to look at these factors, and then hopefully oversize a little bit:

• How big of a welding table are you going to place in the booth? Obviously you need that space, plus at least 2-3 feet around the edges for the welder to move and position themself and the work materials.
• You also need to allow extra for a fume extraction arm, maybe a wall mounted extractor, lighting, and any overhead rails or other lifting assistance needed in the booth.
• It’s not just the booth size you need to worry about. Make sure and keep paths between wide enough for multiple carts to pass, or forklifts if necessary, and an instructor or supervisor sightline.

Structure and Enclosure Materials

The physical enclosure you’re going to erect needs to do a few things.

1. It needs to be flame proof! It is definitely going to be hit by millions of sparks and hot airborn particles. So as with all welding shop gear, if it burns, it doesn’t belong.
2. It needs to be durable. It’s going to get impacted by materials FOR SURE. It’s not a matter of if…
3. Any see-through material must be weld rated. You can’t just use green see-through plastic. It won’t filter the dangerous invisible light! It’s worse than having none, because people think they are safe to stare, and will get way more exposure!
4. I would highly recommend it be affixed to the ground, especially if there are multiple contiguous booths. Otherwise when a booth is bumped, it will move all of them and that’s flat out dangerous. Big time.

Generally speaking, booths basically all use steel posts (uprights, columns), and often they incorporate horizontal cross members which solid panels either bolt to, or are welded to. The vast majority of manufacturers use a solid steel panel because it’s the easiest, cheapest method. Some manufacturers also offer weld rated polycarbonate full or partial panels. I think all welding booths should include some see-through elements, but I’ll get to that a little later.

When you’re examining a welding booth, you need to pay particular attention to the uprights and cross braces and consider what you are going to be attaching to the booth. Many cheap booth makers use 1″ square tubing for the columns and cross bracing. I find that to be highly questionable, not because 1″ tubing won’t hold the weight of the booth when it’s just sitting there – but because it completely lacks the ability to resist side impacts without buckling.

For example, our booths utilize 3″ posts, and 2″ cross bracing. We do this because a 3 inch column has 30 to 45 times the Euler buckling capacity, and if something catastrophic happens to one of the legs it’s that much less likely to take down the entire booth – hurting whoever is nearby or inside.

But there’s another reason the columns and uprights need to be beefy – when it’s time to deal with fume extraction, lighting, or even bolt on welding surfaces, you need the entire structure to not only be strong enough to hold it, but strong enough to hold it rigidly even while you’ve got multiple welders in attached booths all yanking on fume extraction arms, beating on welding surfaces, and whatever other crazy things fabricators routinely do!

This is the main reason we chose to use 3″ columns on our booths. 2″ would be fine… but I don’t like “fine”. If you do a structural analysis on a booth built with 2″ uprights and 1″ cross braces, vs 3″ uprights and 2″ cross braces, you’ll find that the 3″ in” post frame carries about 3.5× the roof weight before column buckling, and the heavier booth is roughly 3× more resistant to a side-impact-induced loss of stability than the lighter booth.

So again, if you’re going to be mounting heavy things in the air, attached to the booth, you better make sure that it’s beefy enough to not just hold it – but to ensure it won’t immediately collapse in the event of a simple accident.

Work Surfaces, Fixturing, Grounding

Wall Mounted vs Freestanding Work Surface

Some welding booths have accommodations for optional welding surfaces to be physically attached. For example, very often smaller booths, like a 4’x4′ or 5’x5′ booth will incorporate what they like to call “welding tables”, but I would only call a metal shelf. Technically you can weld on them, and if we’re talking about a classroom or for a purpose where very small things are being assembled and flatness, toolholding and torsional rigidity are not a concern – fine.

However, I would argue that a proper freestanding fixture table is infinitely more appropriate than an attached welding surface.

• Freestanding fixture tables will be super flat, so the projects built on them can turn out as expected.
• The holes in fixture tables will allow for an infinite number of tools and techniques.
• If the table surface is attached to the booth, every movement will transfer to the booth structure, and on down the line.

Work Surface Materials

In my opinion, it’s just not a good idea to utilize a booth mounted welding surface unless nothing being done on it is critical. If you do get a booth mounted welding surface, make sure it is raw, unpainted steel!

• Powder coated or painted steel won’t allow a welding machine to be clamped to it for electrical transfer. So you’re going to flat out piss off every welder in the booth.
• The last thing you want is a coating that is in contact with 2,000 degree steel. There is no coating that won’t burn, creating harmful fumes.
• If you give a welder a crapping welding surface, expect them to tack things to it in order to fixture their projects. They need raw steel to weld to and then grind off.

Ventilation And Fume Extraction, Correctly Sized

Speaking of burning coatings… now we’re dealing with protecting EVERYONE’S lungs. The folks both inside and outside the booths. And the overarching concept is that we need two different, but equally important, types of protection: source-capture and general ventilation.

Options

• Source capture: absolutely 100% critical and expected by any safety organization globally – you must have fume extraction right where a welder is working. This could be an articulating extraction arm, or a back-draft / side-draft / down-draft plenum. But you must try and capture as much of the fumes at the source as possible.
• General ventilation: I guarantee you won’t get all of the fumes, and that’s where a general air cleaner comes into play. I’m talking about something like Plymovent’s SCS-Diluter.

Filtration requirements:

• Whatever filtration you implement, you must make absolutely certain it specifically designed for welding fume extraction. Those systems generally include spark arrestors, and massive filters that can suck up a lot of the harmful elements found in weld smoke. (It’s BAD!!!)
• If you’re recirculating air inside the facility, make sure local rules permit and you meet filter and monitoring requirements.
• Keep in mind that welding stainless or plated steel can increase hex-Cr risk, and your filtration must specifically be rated for it! Normal fume extraction filters WON’T get it all!
• Verify designed CFM, check capture effectiveness visually with smoke, and log filter pressure drops over time. OSHA’s OTM ventilation chapter is a good procedure framework.

Now, even within the category of source capture, there are two main types. Centralized fume extraction, and individual.

Centralized vs Individual Booth Extraction

• With an individual system, the fume extraction arm is generally mounted directly to the fan motor and air filter box. It’s a 1:1 ratio. You just hang one in every cell. The advantage here is typically simplicity, however you now have a lot of filters to manage individually.
• With a centrally located system, each booth still has an arm, but the arms are ducted back to one giant dust collector. These might cost a little more up front, but it’s generally going to be more energy efficient, offer a lot more power, and most importantly have centralized collection bins to empty and filters to cover the entire system.

One other big advantage of a central system is that you can locate it in a place that minimizes noise. A quieter environment is also a safer and healthier environment.

Mounting Components to the Booth

With either system you’re going to need to make sure that the booth is stable enough and optimized for any arm that might be attached. You don’t want the arm, or the booth flexing and wobbling in use. With individual systems, you also need to make sure the booth can safely handle the added weight of the entire system hanging out above everyone’s heads! (Remember what I said earlier about flimsy cheap tubing!!!)

Lighting And Sightlines

Visibility is Imperative!

As a shop owner, I can tell you there’s nothing worse than sticking people in tiny little black boxes. Yes, you can put steel walls all around, but there are three huge problems with that in my opinion:

• Employee Morale – who the hell wants to stand in a dark little box alone all day? Not me.
• Safety – If something happened, how long would it take before someone noticed and got help?
• Monitoring – I hate that I have to say this, but if you put some people in a closed booth they’ll goof off.

So if you ask me, it is imperative to have as much visibility in and out of a welding booth as possible. They should all incorporate see-through elements, either flexible or fixed, which are weld rated.

No Such Thing As Too Much Light!

You also can’t give a welder too much light! It’s dark under that welding hood! The more light you can provide for them to see their work piece when that welding arc starts, the better the results they are going to provide.

• Combine high power, high-CRI ambient light with extra task lighting. Give the booth extra light switches they can turn on when desired. They may not always need it, but they’ll probably always turn it on!
• Use sealed, impact-resistant fixtures with service access outside the fume zone. If the lights are directly over the weld fumes, they will get dirty and haze up.
• Plan instructor or supervisor sightlines that preserve bystander protection.

By the way, I know I just said to use a boatload of light, but you’re probably thinking like a normal room. NO!!! You need about 100 lumens per square foot of welding table, which means you’re going to need to throw 5,000-10,000 lumens into that booth! That’s like 5-10 times the light you’d have in a similar sized room at home.

It’s WAY, WAY better to put twice as many lights in the booth as you think they need, and just provide 2 switches. That way, they can either have a LOT of light, or a WHOLE LOT of light.

Electrical And Utilities Inside The Booth

Apologies in advance, but this is a big section, and unfortunately probably the most ignored! People start shopping for a booth without considering all the components that need to be in the booth, or that the booth needs to be designed to accommodate and it ends up costing a lot more down the road.

Layout options to decide up front

Another reason I advocate for completely modular booth designs is that there’s no one size fits all. If you intend to place your booths against a fixed facility wall you have to decide if you’re going to use it or cover it. If you put your booths in the middle of a facility you need to decide how you’re going to get utilities to it. So you have to start by making a decision about the layout.

1. Open back design. Side walls only, utilities mounted to the facility wall. Easiest for piping and conduit changes, best for gas manifolds and master disconnects.
2. Closed back design. Full three-wall booth with sealed pass-throughs and interior raceways. Cleaner visually, more noise control, more planning effort. The only option for free standing booths.
3. Overhead service beam. Power, gas, air, and a light rail above the table with drops. Good for modular reconfiguration.

Power for welders and tools

Design the booth as a mini workcell. Plan where power, lighting, fume extraction, gases, and controls will live before you place steel. Most standard booths ship without electrical or gas raceways, so the electrician and facilities team have to route and mount everything.

Our welding booths are uniquely designed to allow flexible conduit and tubing to route through our uprights and cross bracing, but no one else does that. So you have to plan out how and where external conduit is going to be routed.

• Dedicated welding machine circuit per booth. Size from the welder nameplate and duty cycle. Many sites use 240 V single-phase or 208, 240, 480 V three-phase for higher output. DO NOT share welder circuits with receptacles for hand tools.
• Location. The welder outlet needs to be placed to minimize tripping hazards with the cord in the booth. That might mean mounting on the rear wall or at an overhead position. Or have conduit run inside the booth to a position that keeps cords off walking paths and out of the clearance ring.
• Disconnect. A lockable local disconnect within sight of the booth simplifies service and safety.
• General receptacles. Provide at least two 120 V outlets for grinders, lights, chargers, and a laptop. Put them outside the spark zone or use in-use covers. I’d also recommend having outlets on multiple sides of the booth, again to minimize cords in paths.
• Cord management. Even better – use ceiling reels or low-profile floor troughs if possible. No cords draped across aisles unless you love paying OSHA fines.

Shielding gas and air

• Decide cylinder-on-cart versus piped gas.
  • Cylinders on the welder cart. Simplest. Provide chains at the cart, clear path in and out, and keep cylinders outside the direct spark plume when possible. Keep in mind that this means a larger cart, which eats up valuable space inside the booth. Also, means a lot of tank changes for your welder as opposed to centralized system they just plug into and don’t worry about.
  • Piped gas distribution. Run hard lines on the facility wall behind the booth or overhead. Use proper regulators, flashback arrestors where required, color coding, and labeled quick-connects at the booth. This allows bulk gas purchasing which saves money, and saves time vs every welder running around changing individual tanks all the time. Will definitely save money in the long run.
• If you add a booth rear wall. Include sealed pass-throughs with grommets or bulkhead fittings for gas and power. Otherwise, consider leaving the facility wall exposed and use the booth sidewalls only so utilities mount directly to the real wall.
• Compressed air. Minimum -one drop with a ball valve, filter, and quick-connect kept out of the spark zone.

Doors, Openings, Curtains, And Viewing Panels

I touched on visibility previously, but to reiterate, I strongly believe you need to have some visibility through the booths. If not for productivity, for safety. If a welder passed out in a booth or was injured and no one noticed because you have solid walled booths, that is 100% going to be a preventable situation and you WILL get sued to hell.

But other considerations:

• Door width for carts and fixtures. Think about what you need to roll in and out of the boot and make sure the opening will accommodate. Yet another reason modular booth systems matter. If you have rigidly fixed booth and ever change what you need to get in or out of it, you’re going to have to purchase and entirely new booth.
• Protective visibility. Use ISO 25980 labeled curtains or AWS-conforming screens for arc attenuation at openings. Keep in mind that cheap curtains tear constantly! And welders get lazy and won’t pull them closed. I think the best thing is to have a steel wall panel, with a rated polycarbonate section that is see-through in the middle. But what do I know…
• Decide on solid vs curtain door openings. We offer barn-door style sliding doors as an option, which are actually solid doors on a slide unit. They’re much more durable, safer, and more expensive. Or you can spend $100 on little hanging plastic curtains and keep constantly replacing them every 6-12 months as they get torn and wear out. And hope that the plastic actually is rated for real arc protection… because I don’t care what they claim, it’s all coming from a factory in China.

Fire And Life Safety

Oh, here we go again with more safety crap! I know… but you need to design the booth to fit into your facility’s hot-work program and NFPA 51B. Treat every weld as hot work, require a permit, a pre-job scan, and a signed close-out. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you really need to work on that, but here’s the crash course.

Core hot-work controls

• Permit and pre-check: Remove or shield combustibles within 35 ft, cover floors, drain flammables from lines, cap unused gas outlets.
• Fire watch: Trained person with an extinguisher during work and at least 30 minutes after, extend to 60 minutes for high-hazard materials or hidden voids.
• Housekeeping: No cardboard, rags, filters, or solvent cans in or above the booth. Empty spark catch trays and change fume filters on schedule.

Sprinklers and detection

• Sprinkler shadowing: Solid booth panels and canopies can block spray. Keep 18 in vertical clearance below sprinkler deflectors, use open framing or listed baffles, and avoid continuous solid roofs unless the AHJ approves.
• Detectors: Welding smoke can nuisance-trip photoelectric sensors. Use heat detection in the booth where allowed, place smoke detection in surrounding areas, and coordinate exhaust airflow so detectors still see real smoke.

Extinguishers and first response

• At each booth: One ABC or BC extinguisher sized per hazard, plus a Class D extinguisher wherever magnesium, aluminum, or other reactive metals are cut, ground, or welded. Keep dry sand drums only where Class D risks exist.
• Training: Operators and fire watch know which extinguisher to grab and how to pull power and gas quickly. This is another reason to have safety electrical shutoffs near the front of each booth – so anyone can run over and throw the switch if you need to kill everything in the booth.

Gases and energy sources

• Cylinders: Upright, chained, caps on when not in use. Separate oxygen from fuel gas by 20 ft or a 5 ft, 30-minute rated barrier. Install flashback arrestors where required.
• Shutoffs: Local, clearly labeled shutoffs for power, gas, and extraction within sight of the booth. Lockable when servicing.

Confined space and ventilation

• Geometry traps fumes: Deep hoods, tall parts, or partial roofs can create confined-space conditions. Apply confined-space rules when entry hazards exist, test the atmosphere, and mechanically ventilate.
• Ventilation enforcement: Use local capture first, verify airflows, and keep breathing-zone concentrations within limits. Do not rely on general dilution when local capture is feasible.

Ergonomics And Material Handling

One thing that people constantly forget to address when deciding on a booth is how the people inside the booth are supposed to pick up and move heavy stuff!!! So before you decide on the size of your booth, you need to think this through and make some determinations.

• Do you need a crane? Jib cranes, short monorails, or ceiling trolleys matched to booth spans all need to be accounted for. We have a line of bridge cranes made to fit inside our welding booths which can allow for something heavy to be picked up at the door to the booth and moved anywhere inside. A corner mounted jib crane could offer a limited range of movement, but requires serious floor mounting.
• Fighting fatigue. Another reason I hate booth mounted “welding tables” is that they are usually the wrong height. Free standing fabrication tables within the booth allow for table heights to be tuned to process posture. Also, when possible provide mats and anti-fatigue surfaces for standing work.
• Do you need removable walls? Sometimes you might need to move something pretty large into a booth via a forklift or other method, but to do so you need to remove a section of wall paneling. Kind of like removing a fence to your back yard if you’re putting in a pool. If that’s the case, make sure your booth can accommodate that kind of modularity.

Modularity And Future-Proofing

There are two different types of modularity when it comes to welding booths. First is booth level modularity. Almost all systems offer this. Essentially, can you place entire booths side by side, or back to back, and create rows?

The second type of modularity is component level. For this one, as far as I know Texas Metal Works is literally the only manufacturer anywhere that does this, essentially because I invented it.

Sorry if that sounds like bragging, it’s not intended. But the concept is that the booths are built like tinker toys or legos. You can combine uprights, cross braces, etc. any way you want to – and every component can be replaced or recombined at any time. To me, that ensures that money I invest in booths never has to be fully lost if I ever need to make changes. I might have to get some new panels, or cross braces, but then I just have more spare pieces.

I highly recommend:

• Favor frame based booths that accept bolt-on panels and curtain bays so you can reconfigure placement and sizing.
• In multi-booth rows, consider shared fume extraction designed for simultaneous duty.
• Consider putting in a centralized shielding gas distribution manifold so you don’t have tanks everywhere.
• Make sure your electrician leaves spare capacity in panels that feed the booths, because you WILL forget something.
• When in doubt, oversize your booths a little bit. Whatever you’re building today may not be what you build later.

Final Thoughts

I’m out of advice. Sorry if you didn’t expect me to have so much to say about so much stuff, but I hope it at least helps you think through a few things you might have missed. Everything I’m sharing comes from experience, so if you can learn a little without having to go through all of my failings, I consider that a win! 🙂

If you want some help with designing booths for your implementation and you think the ones we offer would be a good fit, we’re happy to help with mapping it out to your space. We can even build a 3D model to ensure everything is going to fit and we’re not missing anything. But even if you want to get booths elsewhere, I hope this guide helps you with your project!