paint on external brickwork, easy to remove?

Stripper works well on render but bricks would be too irregular I think. Try it and see how well it lifts the paint. The danger is you end up scrubbing it further into the brick face when it's liquid.

Anything but easy I'd say. Trouble is the stuff usually soaks into the faces of the brick (and the mortar between). I've tried a combination of stripper and wire brushing but it's very heavy going and not particularly effective.

Consider one option which would be to overpaint using brick-coloured paint: not the same as naked bricks, but maybe easier on the eye than what you've got. Would look better if the walls were repointed at the same time - ie rake out old mortar -> paint wall -> repoint.

Or maybe just leave it all alone! ;-(

David

Pressure washer or sandblasting is your only hope.

The washer may not be able to cope without stripper first.

Not a good idea to sandblast such bricks, it is liable to to damage the fireskin and thereby cause long term heavy deterioration.

All paint comes off eventually, if you know what type of paint it is you can hasten the process a great deal. One really effective approach that doesnt damage the brick at all is a vortex device that I cant recall the name of. These folks might be some help:

Are you talking about the 'twirly wand' attachment which Kaercher pressure washers have?

David

Do all bricks have a fireskin? The local ones round here look pretty uniform inside and out, and removing the face by blasting appears to have made no difference

What difference does it make what sort of paint it is?

One really effective approach

I wasnt, but that sounds like a good idea once its been chemically broken down. The thing I had in mind produces a vortex of water, and somehow its very effective at this job. Unfortunately I dont remember the name.

NT

Trouble with the very soft Victorian bricks in general use in old houses is that once the harder fireskin has been breached, in many cases freeze/thaw cycles will slowly turn the brick to dust, layer by layer, and may over the years destroy the entire brick. So you dont want to do something to a whole wall that causes this down the line. Doesnt happen on every property, but its a common problem.

All bricks have a more cooked fireskin, but some have more resilient cores than others.

If its oil based, you want NaOH and lime, the worlds cheapest oil paint stripper. If it isnt, you'd need something else.

NT

I thought lime would come into it somewhere. Nice idea, but you can't get sufficient caustic into the mix to be effective and, if you did, it would be too sloppy to stay on the wall. Better to use flour actually

If you search groups on Google for the title 'Removing paint from brickwork' (without the quotes) and limit it to this September you should be able to turn up the whole thread.

thank you frank, and thank you to all the other posters. it was particularly interesting to hear iof the dangers of sandblasting off the 'fireskin'.

Robert