Exterior Painting Tips

One exterior painting problem that most homeowners fear is peeling gutters and downspouts. It's quite annoying ... effectively. The paint on the rest of your house looks like a good place, but your gutters and downspouts shed paint like a side of the river Birch bark bark on a bad day.

Gutter peeling is typically common to galvanized metal gutters. The problem exists because the wrong paint was used for the first coat on the gutters and downspouts. The most common mistake I've seen, is the basic application of oil paint directly to bare metal galvanized. This is simply not the retention of more than a few years.

I ran the test in recent years, points 26 to the base oil paint applied to bare metal as the main culprit. Ninety per cent of working time for painters builders made this crucial error.

I also found that most oil base primers will not properly bond to galvanized metal. I found that it is a primer cement based bonds very well to galvanized gutters. Porter Paints carries a product call Porter Guard Galvanized Metal Primer 290. It contains cement and it does a great job of bonding long term.

If you read this article and have problems with peeling gutters there is good news and bad news.

OK, here's the bad news. Be ready for all the bands or your gutters back down to bare metal and start over, or be ready to service your gutters on a fairly regular basis. Scraping and priming will not re-establish a connection in areas that have not peeled. Putting primer and top coat on all your gutters at this point will not reconnect. It can not penetrate trough the existing paint and cause the defective paint underneath to re-bond to the galvanized sheet. You will continue to develop peeling on these metal surfaces over time.

The good news is that you can eliminate what is peeling now and the first bare metal with primer I mentioned above. He will stop the peeling in those areas.

Here are some important steps you must take.

1. First, you must remove any loose paint from the downspouts and gutters with a wire brush or scraper. A metal wheel on a drill works well.

2. Clean the area of sand with a good solvent to remove oil on the surface. Wipe the metal with a thick layer of solvent and allow it to evaporate completely.

3. After evaporation of the solvent, apply the cement based metal primer paint directly on the bare galvanized metal spots. Allow primer to dry according to manufacturers recommendations and then apply the latex paint or oil based paints or as a top coat.

If you remove all the oils from the bare metal with the solvent, you can cover the bare metal with latex paint. I have found over the years that if the surface was clean, just plain latex paint adheres to bare galvanized metal much better than oil-based paint.

Finish the job with at least one coat of good quality building. Use two coats in extreme cases.