“Green” Powder Coated Fences In Melbourne.
In one of our previous blog posts we travelled behind seven seas, into a fairy land of Melbourne. Why? Well, keeping up with the latest royal wedding and our business – Melbourne fencing of course. Work and pleasure hand in hand. We did mention that our fairy dust is a steel powder coating. So today we will focus on an environmentally friendly powder coated fencing in Melbourne. We’ll try to answer questions like what it is and the process of how it’s done.
Let’s jump from a fairy land into a really modern world. We just have to because centuries ago we didn’t have such a highly developed technology that is used to produce majority of… well, everything nowadays.
Powder coating has recently faced a very high growth of the demand. It has become a very popular solution in the fencing industry as well. But first things first. What is powder coating? Putting it in lay terms, it’s basically a type of metal finishing that is applied as a free flowing dry powder. But why has it’s popularity spiked in the recent years?
It’s environmentally friendly or let’s say a “green” coating process. Conventional liquid paint requires a solvent to keep the binder and filler parts in a liquid suspension form, powder coating on the other does not. You might think that paint is just some liquid coming out our of a tin can, but it’s actually has three main components: pigment, binder and solvent. Why elimination of the solvent from the paint is environmentally friendlier? A solvent is something that dissolves something else. In paint it makes pigment and a binder liquid so it would be easier to apply it to different surfaces. But once the paint had spread out, the solvent evaporates into the air, leaving the paint evenly applied and dry beneath it. Have you noticed while painting the smell of the paint. Easily put it’s just the solvent evaporating into the air. Some of the solvents used in paints are VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which evaporate to make localised air pollution and can have a variety of long-term health impacts. Many modern day paints, like latex paints, use water as solvent which luckily is a relatively safer than old paints.
But VOCs are not only released into the air as the paint is cured, it also happens as the paint is ageing. VOCs damage the ozone and if trapped indoors, they can cause serious health problems to people exposed to them. So here you go, using liquid paint is not only dangerous to the environment, but also very dangerous to workers, who are exposed to VOCs while applying on the liquid paint.
At Diamond Fence we love to be as environmentally friendly and use powder coating in our steel and metal fencing applications, as powder coating is considered generally non-toxic and is highly recommended to use as finishing element in fencing.
We got into a deep discussion over the environmental reasons of powder coating. Let’s take a look how powder coating is done. Using spray booths with experienced operators, who electrostatically apply powder coating to the items allows to coat diverse range of items without letting the high standard and quality to suffer. A process called electrostatic spray deposition (ESD) is used to apply powder coating to a metal substrate with spray guns, which apply electrostatic charge to the powder particles, which then are attracted to the grounded part. Once the powder coating is on, the parts covered with it enter into an curing oven, where with addition of the heat the coating chemically reacts to produce a long, very resistant to a breakdown, molecular chains, resulting in high cross-link density.
Great thing about powder coatings is that it can also be applied to non-metallic substrates such as plastics. But for Diamond Fence powder coating is perfect solution for commercial fencing, industrial fencing and of course residential fencing in Melbourne. This type of coating can be applied to different steel fences like chain wire fences, tubular steel decorative fences, welded mesh panels and many different items. The size and shape doesn’t matter as it can be powder coated regardless.
One of the best things about powder coating is also the variety of colours that can be applied to your fence. Basically the colour pallet is wide open for you to choose the best colour that suits the surroundings of your home, business, building site or any other property.
Never hurts to say twice, but at Diamond Fence, being environmentally friendly is important, therefore for Melbourne fencing we are using powder coated tubular steel fences, regardless if it’s for commercial fencing, industrial fencing, or residential fencing. Powder coating is our preferred coating application for sure!
If you have any fencing inquiries, then please don’t hesitate and call us on (03) 9753 4566 , shoot us an email on info@diamondfence.com.au, or just get a FREE online quote.
