We bought this to strip years of paint from windows in a 160+ year old 52 room building, once a Poor Home, now a Historical Museum,and if it died tomorrow,, we'd buy another. Yes it works that well. We are also removing the glazig around the glass, and on glazing,,It's amazing!! The calked in glasses,,, eh. And "someone" loved calking in glass. It's not the fastest tool out there, but with fast comes fire and broken glass, 2 things we don't want. Also it's highly portable, which means we can strip woodwork and doors, after the windows. It you've got a paint removal project with detail work
or need to change a bunch of glazed in window panes, look hard at this tool.

I hate stripping wood! Promised the spouse I'd take some trim in our kitchen down to the wood since they like the wood look. Bought this IR stripped to hopefully make the process go faster and this thing is great! Photo was from time just trying it out a bit. I put it on the trim for only about 10 seconds and used a razor to pull off the paint and was shocked this thing went down about 8 layers of paint!

I still hate stripping wood but the IR stripper made the labor 10 times faster than I know it would have been without it. Took me about 2 hours to strip this door trim and another hour to do a window. It didn't get everything off 100% maybe about 90% which is great considering there were a lot of crevices on my trim. We'd already tried a heat gun and it was nothing compared to the IR paint stripper. Fumes were also less than with the regular heat gun.

We had an old (pre 1745) home in NY State. Our intent was to maintain all original everything in the house. With years of paint layered one on top of the other, we were looking for a solution that would work without damaging the wood base. After several false starts with several other products, we found the IR paint stripper. This tool is everything and then some. Not only did it work but it was way easier to use than anything else we tried. I would absolutely recommend this product over all others.

My project is restoring a 1930s Art Deco piano that was in show business, where it was repainted at least 14 times! Reading about options for paint removal, the Infrared method seemed to offer the best hope of getting multiple layers at a time AND avoiding scorching the beautiful Ash wood that was laying at the bottom.

The image on the Left shows the 11 color layers revealed by sanding (where the uppermost Black-Gray-Black color layers were already peeled off.) The image on the Right shows a 10" long strip of ALL the paint layers, that was easily removed with a putty knife, after allowing the paint to "bubble and smoke" per the instructions -- about 30 secs or so. Folks, this really works and has made this daunting task seem very approachable. And yes, I didn't create a single scorch on the wood.

My one complaint with the unit is that the ON/OFF switch is located on the handle where I inadvertently turned it off on several occasions. Once getting aware of that I was able to stop doing it and happily toasted away. If you are coordinated, while scrapping one area one can heat an adjacent area, to save time.

I wanted to write a review because I was torn between getting this or the high end competitor; the cobra. You're more likely to be like me, realizing that there ain't much choices for infrared paint strippers.

"do i buy this $140 piece of equipment or splurge $500 for a Cobra?"

I say, yes and no. Cobra definitely is worth the money and works better but this IR Stripper ain't so bad! IR stripper will get the job done and works pretty well. It is slower and slightly cumbersome to use.

Pros:
- its a reasonable price for a tool especially if you're new to restoring windows. This is where it really shines because the tool works well enough and when you've had it on long enough, it works even faster.
- it's harder to burn the wood and crack glass panes since it's on lower heat. You should still use tin foil for shielding on the glass.

Cons:
- it does take a little time to warm up, much longer than 2 mins before its really hot and heavy.
- the handle is cheap. the swivel is cheap and only goes one direction. Its primarily for storage, not for during use. I would have respected the person who designed this tool more if they put a way to attach this to something off-hand so you could easily set up a station to bake and scrape.
- there's no temperature gauge to tell you how hot it really is. Only a lazily placed on-off switch.
- one of the design flaws is that you have to put the device really close to the surface to speed things up. this results in eventually getting a lot of bubbling and flaking paint touching the heating element and it gets pretty gross under there when it sticks on it. Luckily, the heating plate is indeed durable and i'm not really sure how to tidy that heating element and just kinda decided to not clean it out of fear of braking the element.

Protip:
- Set up a way to attach this to a pole and sturdy stand. I used a band clamp to secure the handle to a pole and the pole to a ladder. You really dont want to hold this hot tool for a long time especially considering scraping hot paint is time consuming. Set up a station with all the wood you need to scrape and keep baking while scraping. time goes by fast and it feels good to see so much paint coming off quickly.

Overall, this is the correct tool to buy that is safer than a heat gun and it can do small-big projects. If you are torn by price between the two devices, get this for sure. If you have the money and will regularly be stripping paint, get cobra. I'm happy with this device while it lasts and will get a Cobra anyways.