Category Paint Failures

Many property owners ask us why there last paint job didn’t last as long as they had expected. The answer to this question is not a simple one and not because the causes aren’t know, but because there are quite a few factors that involve paint longevity. In the following post, we will explore the various reasons for fading paint and how we, the painting contractor, can help extend the life of your paint job.

Preparation

All good paint jobs begin with preparing the substrate. In the industry we use the initials CDDS – Clean, Dry, Dull, and Stable. When we have these four conditions, our paint has a good chance of adhering and functioning as it should for many years to come. I will cover why each one is important below:

Clean – this one is obvious. If the surface is dirty, the paint will adhere to the dirt and the bond is only as strong as the weakest bond in the system and dirt doesn’t typically bond too well! Any professional painter will always clean the surface before painting it. If your painter isn’t cleaning with pressure washing or similar method, they are doing you a disservice.

Dry – that a surface needs to dry might seem obvious, but some paints actually recommend that you dampen the surface first. These paints are usually masonry paints and the moisture helps extend the dry time so the paint has time to correctly bond and crosslink. A painter must always be mindful of the limitations of paint and how it was designed to be used. This information is found in the PDS (Product Data Sheet) or TDS (Technical Data Sheet) on file with the manufacturer. Wood is by far the most absorbent exterior building product. Our team carries moisture meters with them so they can ensure the wood is dry enough to paint. Painting surfaces that are too wet will cause the paint to have poor adhesion and may even damage the paint film as the moisture dilutes the paint.

Dull – it is difficult to get paint to stick to many shinny surfaces. Tile, glass, high sheen plastics, etc. are the most difficult surfaces to paint. Shinny is often achieved by creating a surface with densely packed molecules. Shinny surfaces resist absorption while dull surfaces usually readily accept water. One of the main methods of getting paint to bond to a surface is by forming a mechanical bond. The resin in paint is absorbed into the substrate and gets “keyed” into the surface. If you were to look at a surface in a very high powered microscope, you would see a very rough surface (kind of like the surface of the moon). The resin in paint fills all the voids and dries in them creating a strong bond. The second method of creating a bond is called the chemical bond. This happens when the bonding chemical either etches the surface to create a mechanical bond or softens the substrate just enough for the them to meld together. Bonding primers are a specialty product and must only be used on substrates they are designed to be use on.

Stable – this simply means that the substrate is sound. If the substrate is weak and disbonding from itself of the sub substrate, the new bond will only be as strong as the previous bond. A good example of this is paint that might look like it is adhering well, but is letting go underneath it all. New paint can sometimes stress out this bad bond and cause a more rapid disbonding. A painter must remove all unstable coatings and materials before applying the new paint or primer. We see this often on precast and CMU (concrete masonry units) buildings where water has penetrated the surface and is causing the paint to disbond from the surface. This must be removed before you paint.

Application

Application affects fading too. If paint is applied in weather that is too wet or too hot, the paint cannot properly cure. If the substate is too wet from dew, recent rain or even ambient humidity in the right circumstances, it can dilute the paint and cause uneven curing. If it is too hot and sunny, you risk the paint drying too quickly, not giving the resins the appropriate time to properly set up in the initial cure. Professional painters will follow the technical specs and will know from experience the circumstances that cause failure. One should never be too flippant about the ambient conditions when applying exterior paint!

Some substrates have special considerations too. Painting over cementitious substrates takes knowledge of the building material. Many painters skip priming on pre primed fiber cement siding and trim. This “shortcut” is almost always a mistake. The priming process at the factory often locks in high PH cement and doesn’t allow it to dissipate normally. You must pressure wash and prime fiber cement siding and trim before you paint it – even if it has been pre primed! Precast is best when you let it set for 6 months and, even then, you must prime it with a PH resistant primer. CMU needs to sit for at least 7 days (we prefer 30 days for the best results) and, even after that time frame, a good painter will use a modern block surfacer that handles high PH levels better. Even with all these precautions, we recommend waiting 48 hours before top coating to allow a good barrier to from between the substrate and the top coats. Taking shortcuts here will result in premature fade and, sometimes, early paint failure!

Finally, film build is important in exterior paint performance! Too thin and the paint will not be able to perform as it was design – too thin and the UV rays will penetrate the film too deeply and cause the paint to degrade too quickly. A good painter will take great care to control the application of paint so that the it reached the appropriate film thickness so it can perform as it was designed.

Environment

The environment the building is in matters for paint longevity. High sun and industrial environments are among the hardest on the paint film. The sun’s UV rays will break down the resins and pigments causing faster film breakdown. Industrial environments can also cause faster breakdown by speeding up the oxidation of the film if there are a lot of contaminants in the air that cause oxidation.

Quality

The quality of paint will also make a difference. Cheaper paints will have more fillers and will have a lower DFT (dry film thickness) because they are lower in solids. This is one reason you don’t want your painting contractor to water down the paint! A good quality, higher solids paint will be worth the extra cost. The resin technology in cheaper paints is also weaker and less UV or chemical resistant. Premium products will have the best resins in them and will have to prove their worth in publications like consumer reports. 

We recommend AcriShield or Permanizer from PPG, Behr e600 for commercial work and any of the upper line Behr products for a more durable finish. Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore also sell great product lines too.

Sitting at one of my favorite Downton Indy work spots, I couldn’t help but notice same really poor panting had recently taken place.  I started to ask myself, what if this was our team that did this?  How would I want my customer to respond?  Unfortunately, we see too much of this and most building owners and facility managers probably just chalk it up to “well, it’s bad, but most people won’t notice” or “we’ll fix it next year during our repaint.”  This is problematic on a few levels.

First, if you paid a reputable contractor a fair contract price, you owe it to your company to get better results than that.  Second, you aren’t doing any favors to the company you hired or to their crew who underperformed.  Every company will experience a “bad” job, even good companies because we are human and we tend to skip steps in our quality assurance program when we get overbooked.  If it was my team that did this, I’d want to know.  First, our company has standards and we want to be held accountable to those standards.  Acceptable is just another word for minimally okay.  We like to think we are better than that and if we are continually let off the hook by sub standard work, that will then become the standard for an Indiana Painting job.

Second, as an owner, I want to understand how our company is performing – especially when things aren’t going well.  We are in the business of improving things.  We improve your property and we constantly are improving our services and performance so we can serve you better.  Can you imagine the momentum we’d have and the incredible service that companies could offer if we all worked toward becoming just .5% better today than we were yesterday?  Over a year that would be 175% better than we were last year.  And that doesn’t capture the compounding nature of investments.

Finally, we are all created in God’s image.  The implications of this are far reaching.  We all see really good service or a really good product and we understand the feeling.  It is the feeling you get when someone is living within their God given role and reaching their potential.  There is no feeling quite so good and the joy and the urging for better that it brings to others is really phenomenal.  Now let’s see the problems and what we would want if this was on one of our projects.

My point to this article is not to shame a building owner or another contractor, far from it. My purpose is to let you know that if you paid a decent price for this job, you should expect better for your sake, the end user’s sake, and the sake of your contractor. As the business owner, I would want to be called right away.  I am proud of our work and proud of our team’s consistently pushing for improvement.  Misalignment is always more demoralizing when you see it a year after the project was completed!  We don’t require perfection, but we require ourselves to get as close to it as we are capable of in that moment.  We have a sign in our office that reads “Do your job!”  Perhaps we should add to it “Then do your job better.”

Nothing is more disheartening than finding extreme damage to your concrete block walls. If you own a CMU building, you probably know what I am talking about. Loose paint, stair steps, water bags, missing mortar joints, and efflorescence are just a few of the problem building owner face and the maintenance of these buildings can be a painful lesson in vigilance.

Some problems are caused by movement as the wall heats up and cools down. On a winter day it isn’t uncommon for the walls to reach ambient temperatures as low at -20 degrees F and, if your walls are painted a dark color, to reach 50 degrees in the daytime sunshine. That is a huge and fast temperature swing in a relatively short time – and this can happen day in and ay out. In the summer, you walls can reach over 120 degrees in the hot summer sun. Most builders put expansion joints in the walls every 20 to 40 feet. Older buildings didn’t usually get this treatment so they are prone to cracking at these stressed areas.

Peeling and missing mortar joints are often the result of getting water inside your wall. Water is a pernicious ruiner of buildings. It can enter through a leaky roof, a cracked mortar joint, a poor paint job that didn’t seal all the pores, a leaky coping, or through failing caulk joints. Once water enters, it will be drawn out by the heat of the day and nothing will stop it. It’s hard to imaging the amount of hydraulic pressure involved as the water is drawn out or as it freezes in the block overnight. Our sprayers operate at around 3,200 psi. Larger hydraulic presses can operate at over 20,000 psi. Freezing water can generate up to 25,000 psi! Nature and her God are incredible! You can only imagine the damage freezing water can do to your building. You should really get this taken care of sooner than later!

Now for the cure. I hate to tell you that once you see peeling paint, the cost to repair it can be multiples of a simple clean and paint. The loose paint will have to be stripped from the block and the failed joints will have to be repaired and this takes very large pressure washers and an abundance of time. A simple fast food exterior repaint goes for around $5,000 but if your building has this kind of damage, that can easily exceed $12,000. The good news is that, once the remedy is applied, your building will be good to go for another decade or so with little to think about. Of course, this doesn’t include the other solutions like a new roof or replaced caulk joints, so you should be prepared to spend a good deal of money!