Two media families compete for the overspray-capture job in booth floors and exhaust walls: progressive-density fiberglass (“paint-stop”) and synthetic polyester arrestor. Both work; they fail differently, and the right pick depends on your paint and your change discipline.
How They Capture Paint
Fiberglass paint-stop is a lofty mat of curly glass fiber, open at the intake face and denser toward the exit. Droplets penetrate deep and stick along the way, so the media loads through its full thickness — that depth is why its paint-holding capacity per square meter is hard to beat. Synthetic arrestor uses bonded polyester fibers, often with a tackified finish; it captures nearer the surface but sheds no glass and handles moisture and rough handling better.
Choose Fiberglass When…
- You spray high-solids or heavy coats — its capacity absorbs abuse between changes.
- Cost per kilogram of paint held is the metric that matters.
- The booth runs hot exhaust — glass shrugs off temperatures that soften synthetics.
Choose Synthetic When…
- Handling matters: it cuts clean, doesn’t itch, and installs without gloves-and-long-sleeves rituals.
- Waterborne paints dominate — polyester tolerates the moisture cycle better.
- Your process sheds fibers into product finishes and glass fragments are a contamination concern.
The Honest Summary
High-volume wet spraying still belongs to fiberglass paint-stop on pure economics. Light-duty booths, waterborne lines and finish-sensitive shops increasingly prefer synthetic. Many of our customers run both — fiberglass in the floor pit, synthetic pads on the exhaust wall — and reorder them together.
We produce both families and will send a comparison sample pack so your painters can vote with their hands: WhatsApp +86 186 1558 6932 or jinhaofeng298@163.com.