Sunburst Logo LLC

Recommendations To Keep Your Shop Cool

Now that it’s finally summer and folks are trying their best to keep cool, take breaks and make improvements to their custom T-shirt printing facility as well as focus on your employees. Here are a few suggestions you might want to consider.

Make sure that you have enough fans. A comfortable employee is a productive one. Since we’re using screen printing equipment that actually gives off heat, such as the over-sized dryers that cure the ink onto the t-shirts, it’s not uncommon that temperatures can reach 105 degrees very quickly during the heat of the afternoon. Just opening up the windows in order to try to add some cross ventilation is probably not going to be adequate. I highly recommend you invest in some over-sized fans in order to keep that air moving. I’ve even seen some that come with misters that really are a game changer when it comes to keeping you cool.

Another recommendation would be to start your work day earlier. You could even shut down during the afternoon hours when the temperature is at its highest and then reopen again in the evening in order to get the lion’s share of your production done at night when it’s cool.

Another thing to also take into consideration is that your equipment is much more likely to fail in extreme temperatures. With the cost of digital t-shirt printing equipment being as expensive as it is, you sure don’t need anything breaking. You also don’t want to incur any downtime that is going to backup your production from cycling through as efficiently as possible.

Keeping your workers properly hydrated is one of the most proactive things you can do. Maybe have a water cooler installed as there are services that provide you with an endless supply of good clean cool drinking water. They will come and pick up the empty canisters and replace them with full ones on an as-needed basis for a very reasonable price. You could even go to a department store such as Sam’s and purchase your own cooler.

Another thing to take into consideration is the way you store your ink as it needs to be in a temperature-controlled environment. Plastic based t-shirt printing inks are considered to be the industry standard and they start to cure when heated up. They have a very limited shelf life and in warm environments ink has a tendency to actually start setting up inside the container before even being used.

Another thing that might help is to encourage your workers to quit drinking hot coffee on their breaks. This seems like it would be a no-brainer but you would be surprised how many people would app to have that. Coffee actually has a tendency to dehydrate your body much like alcohol. Something that you might consider in order to help morale would be to have Team activities such as barbecues as incentives in order to reward good performance. You could even offer paid weekends off in order to help help your workers feel more appreciated and fairly compensated for the unpleasant work conditions that a Saint Louis summer can lend itself to. We all realize that when one employee doesn’t show up for work, that puts an extra burden on everyone else that does so you might want to encourage them to schedule their vacation times in the cooler months. This would help from making what is already a very challenging work environment from getting even worse from lack of help. Another idea would be to invest in a freezer and stock it full of ice cream and popsicles.

To sum it up, these are some very helpful ideas that will help you run a comfortable and productive St Louis t-shirt printing and custom embroidery company throughout the months of June through August.