How much work is to clean & stain cedar deck railing?

We're having a new deck built soon and we're going to use the solid (not hollow) Weatherbest composite decking on it. This deck will have about 70 linear feet of railing on it. The Weatherbest composite railing system is very expensive, however, so we're trying to figure out if it is worth the extra expense to have a maintenance free railing compared to a less expensive cedar railing that would require cleaning and staining every couple years.

The cheapest option (excluding a pressure-treated wood railing, which we don't want) is to go with an all cedar railing, where you use 2x2 cedar balusters connected to the rim joist at the bottom and a top rail of cedar on top. This railing option would require the most upkeep, cleaning and staining.

For about $700 more, we can have a lower-maintenance cedar/aluminum railing built that uses maintenance-free colored aluminum spindles for the balusters. With this option, the top rail and bottom rail would be made of cedar, as well as the posts that go every 6 feet. So we'd still have some cleaning and staining to do every couple years, but at least we wouldn't have to clean and stain all 4 sides of the 150+ cedar balusters, as we would if we chose the all-cedar railing.

And for another $700 more than the cedar/aluminum spindle railing, we can go with an all-composite Weatherbest railing.

So my questions is, for those of you who have cedar railings and have done this before, how many hours do you estimate it would take to clean and stain

70 feet of an all cedar railing with cedar balusters? How much time do you estimate it would take if we went the cedar & aluminum baluster route, where we wouldn't have to do any upkeep on the balusters, but we would have to clean and stain 70 feet of the top and bottom rails and the posts? And knowing how much upkeep is involved with a cedar railing, would you say we should just fork out the extra bucks to get a maintenance free composite railing? If maintaining a cedar railing is a ton of work, then it's probably worth it to pay more upfront for a cedar railing. But if it is not that much work to maintain cedar, we'll probably go that route.

Any advice would be appreciated!!

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Dave K.
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