Rejuv-a-Roller

Professional painters often discard rollers after one use. It’s a question of time, they say. The labor they waste scrubbing paint off a roller costs them more than the money they would spend getting a new one.

There is a fairly inexpensive tool, however, that makes roller-washing so fast and easy, it could end up saving a professional painter a bit of money in high-end rollers.

The tool is called the Rejuv-a-Roller, manufactured by Timeless Innovations Inc. It’s a cylinder that blasts a roller placed inside it with pressurized water, cleaning it with surprising speed.

“All the painters we’ve sold it to and followed up with tend to be shocked at its speed,” says Timeless Innovations president Collin Budron. It will clean a roller in “literally seconds,” he says. “And you don’t have to take it out and turn it around, or pre-scrape it.”

Here’s how the tool works: A paint-soaked roller is placed inside the cylinder and its end stoppered with a plug, ensuring that water will be directed onto the outside of the roller.

The cylinder’s lid is attached to a 4-foot coiled hose, and the other end of the hose is connected to a faucet via an adaptor. Water flowing from the hose hits a pressure chamber in the cylinder lid, and two rows of holes feed it downward onto the nap. The pressurized water scours paint off the roller as it streams through the cylinder. The cleaning tool has a tapered shape, and the water pressure inside ends up being practically double what comes out of a faucet, Budron says.

The Rejuv-a-Roller will flush any size roller between 3 inches and 9 inches, although, ironically, shorter rollers may take slightly longer to finish. It cleans rollers with naps between 3⁄8 inch and 11⁄2 inches, and comes with an inner sleeve that helps it work more effectively on rollers with shorter naps. Its adaptor is compatible with almost all faucets.

The high-pressure head attached to the lid can be used by itself to blast jets of water onto brushes, edgers and pans. And even while the tool is scrubbing a roller, water pours out with enough pressure to scour other tools at the same time. “It’s a total paint cleanup tool,” says Budron.

The Rejuv-a-Roller does cleanup duty on jobs involving latex and water-based paints, stains, clear coats, wallpaper paste, and textured coatings. Oil-based paint is not water-soluble, of course, so the tool might not be much help in that case.