CAN I PAINT MY EXTERIOR VINYL BLACK?

A lot of our clients over the years have asked us to paint their exterior vinyl black, dark gray, blues, browns, etc. and it is just not safe for your property. To give you a little background on vinyl or PVC what it is also called is a versatile plastic material used to make a lot of different things, it is composed of two simple building blocks: chlorine and ethylene.

What happens when you apply dark colors on vinyl? We all know that dark colors tend to get hotter than lighter colors when hit directly by the sun heat, being that vinyl is a plastic material it will catch all of that extreme heat and it will melt or warp and cause extreme damage to your property.

We have a lot of different options when you’re trying to paint your home to get rid of that grayish vinyl color you’ve been tired of looking for years so don’t get discouraged. We always suggest that your professional painter talks directly with their paint provider to make sure that the paint color that you chose and is going to be applied on the vinyl is a VINYL SAFE FORMULA. If you plan on DIY ( Do It Yourself ) this project make sure to call your favorite paint store this can be: Sherwin Williams, Benjamin Moore, Farrell Calhoun, Behr, etc. and pick a color that you like but that is also vinyl safe or can be made into vinyl safe.

For example Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black cannot be made in a vinyl safe formula because it purely consists of black, but there’s an option to make it into Sherwin Williams Black Magic which is also in the black color family but not as dark. What Sherwin Williams do in this case is to substitute their black drops with browns, blues and reds and this will make it usable on vinyl and safe.

WHAT METHOD OF PAINTING SHOULD I USE ON VINYL AND WHAT PAINT?

We strongly suggest that you use a sprayer 100% of the time when painting vinyl do to the fact that vinyl does not have much of a texture like regular hardie board or wood will have, so when you brush and roll vinyl you tend to see brush marks and roller marks all throughout the surface and it does not give you a smooth finish.

When it comes to paint we suggest anything Sherwin Williams SuperPaint and above, this are SuperPaint, Resilience, Latitude, Duration or Emerald. All of this paint products have primer as well so it gives you another layer of protection and durability.

WHAT HAPPENS IF MY SIDING WARPS OR MELTS? CAN IT BE FIXED?

The quick answer is yes but will be really time consuming so try to avoid it to warp by all means, there’s quite a lot of different methods to remove the siding warps but is never guaranteed that it will look like factory again since it has been stretch out do to the sun heat but is never bad to try to fix it before replacing it which is pretty expensive.