Building your own home tanning bed or booth

Many people try to build their own tanning bed or booth, and most fail after spending a great deal of time and money. Building your own tanning bed sounds great on paper, but I will just start by saying that it never is cheaper than buying one if you have to buy all the parts. There *are* certain circumstances where building your own tanning bed, or rather UV box, makes sense, but not for getting a sun tan. I will cover these topics over several posts, so stay tuned. First I want to cover why you should give all hope of making your own tanning bed from scratch.

To begin with, you will always pay a premium for parts when you buy them individually. This is a handling issue. If I buy a ballast for $20, and the net price I sell it for when I put it in a tanning bed is $25-$30, then when I sell it as a stand alone product, it will sell for about $50 or more. Why? Handling and support. This is the same with car parts, or any "part" of a whole. When someone buys a single ballast, that usually means they are replacing one in an existing bed, which means having to figure out which one they need, explaining how to open the bed, replace the unit, etc. This takes time, and in business, time is money.

Also, the item has to be inventoried, which is another set of handling that is different from how it is managed for building a bed. Most companies use JIT inventory for manufacturing (Just In Time) so you get the parts on Wednesday that you will build out next week. Parts for replacement have to be stocked, sitting there, maybe for months. This is more expensive, as the money that bought the ballast to begin with had to come from SOMEWHERE, and banks charge interest for loaning money.

In short, single parts for a tanning bed cost a lot more money than assembled parts because it costs more to ship, handle, warehouse and support them. When you consider how many parts are in a tanning bed, this amount is usually more than the labor costs it takes to build a tanning bed, thus, if you bought individual parts, it would cost you MORE to build your own tanning bed than to just have bought the entire bed.

In an upcoming post, I will explain some of the ways you *can* build your own UV box for special applications such as UV curing finishes for violins, guitars, or other finishes.