deck stain or paint?

[badgolferman]

What do you prefer for using on your deck, stain or paint? Seems to me paint would last longer. Currently I have stain that was put on thick three years ago but it needs to be redone now.

[trader_4]

I've always used solid stain. The essential difference is that paint forms more of a tough film coating, the downside of that is that it's more prone to peeling than a solid stain. I've seen neglected, old siding with stain that never peeled, while the trim that used paint was peeling. There are other variables there, but that's one point I think worth considering. Anything that peels, especially something with a lot of detail, like balusters, the amount of prep work goes up exponentially.

[Ralph Mowery]

The way I understand it, the more pigment in the stain, the beter it is for lasting. Enough pigment and it looks like paint. At least that is the way my deck looked when I stained with the high pigment.

[Mayayana]

| What do you prefer for using on your deck, stain or paint? Seems to me | paint would last longer. Currently I have stain that was put on thick three | years ago but it needs to be redone now. |

This has been discussed a couple of times recently. Acrylic stain is junk. Solid oil-base stain is probably no longer available. Urethane reinforced deck paint is good, but down the road when it peels it's a mess because the paint film is very hard and difficult to scrape.

If you already have stain then you have a kind of suspension coating the deck. You should probably use whatever you used last time. Even if it's acrylic stain, at least that's easy to put on. Having used it already you've ruined the surface for paint. If you put paint over that then you'll have a film that's not bonded to the wood -- only to the stain.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I'd not consider paint. Too prone to peeling.

[Frank]

Paint is a big mistake and EPA doomed formerly satisfactory stains with low VOC rules.

Maybe figure on re-staining every few years.

[trader_4]

If it's such junk, how is it that it's worked extremely well on my cedar sided house for 30 years? It was done for the third time recently. No peeling, not in a single spot.