Arborcoat Stain Review. Should You Buy This Stain from Benjamin Moore?

this is paint live tv i'm christy idaho painter in this video i'm going to be talking about a product and it is benjamin moore arbor coat i have been getting a bunch of questions lately about what product i would use on a deck or what product i'd use on a woodside at home and i have been testing benjamin noor arbor coat for several years now i've used their semi-solids and solid color stains so if you want to know if this is a product that you should use on your project or what i think about benjamin moore arbor coat stay tuned for this video [Applause] [Music] all right so i'm going to talk about uh my experience with benjamin moore arbor coat now i've used their waterborne product and i've used their semi solids and their solid color stains and i've used it on different things i've used it on decks and i've used it on wood sided homes and i've used it in different environments i've used it uh in boise idaho and the treasure valley and then i've also used it up in the mountains where it's a little bit different it's colder and there's a lot of snow during the winter time so i've got some experiences in different environments i've got experiences you know applying it in different temperatures and so forth so i'm going to talk a little bit about it and their product that i've been using is a waterborne product it's a waterboard modified resin product and i i really uh stick to water-based products because of the convenience and ease of use they do have the same product they have their arbico and a oil-based product also that you can use and i'll talk a little bit about where it's beneficial to use that but when it comes to oil-based products just the liability the difficulty cleaning up and then the long dry times i kind of shy away from using the oil based products but once again there is a benefit to them i'll talk about a little bit later i'm i i'm a water-based guy so i use the water-based products that i've been i've been using and testing out um benjamin moore's arbor co for quite some time now all right so i'm going to talk a little bit about uh the branding and marketing of benjamin moore products and and i think the branding and marketing on labeling on their cans is absolutely amazing and i have the confidence to set their cans you know out on a job site and um have a customer see it you know they're you're gonna have your paint sitting outside or inside and i know there's uh there's some companies out there that don't do a very good job you know branding and marketing and labeling on their products and if they're not branded and marketed well you know the customer could not have confidence in the products that you're using but benjamin moore products labeling is really dialed in the arbor coat looks absolutely amazing it's kind of something um you know it's not necessarily you know what's inside the can but what's outside the can is a representation possibly of what is inside the can and i really like their branding marketing and labeling so another thing i want to talk about is designers use the products pretty widely and designers you know use the products quite a bit because and recommend the products quite a bit because they are seen as very high-end products and they they are actually high-end products they make amazing products that perform very well for professional painters and do-it-yourselfers designers widely use it because um they are high-end products and they also have amazing colors their color fandek is absolutely amazing and then the colors hold their colors very well inside and out so designers widely use them we'll talk a little bit about price on the perceived price by some might be high but they are high-end products and in the paint industry you and paint manufacturing and paint products you do truly get what you pay for if you buy uh paint that costs a little money what's inside the can is going to represent a represented representation of what you're paying for so you get what you pay for and it's the same as a paintbrush if you buy a cheap paintbrush you're going to get a cheap paintbrush that performs not very well all right so i'm going to talk about a little bit of the the positive things that i do like about the arbor coat and one of them is the coverage of all the stains i've ever used i don't think any stain actually covers better uh than arbor coat it's it's absolutely amazing it's a their solid color stain is a very um high solids product is about 38 solid so it does cover extremely well and i've used it from colors white and i've used it all the way to colors black and the black covered absolutely amazing was extremely impressed with uh the product itself so it does cover very well and that's one of the main things that i like about it another positive thing i want to say about the arbor coat and one of the things i do really like about it is its ability to avoid lap marks brush strokes or roller marks and there's that's one of the things with semi-transparent stains and semi-solid stains and even solid color stains that's it's very difficult to not get lap marks or roller marks and you're always trying to find logical start and stop points and you're trying to lay it out i gotta say of all the stains i've ever used arbor coat is one of the better stains when it comes to avoiding brush strokes lap marks or even roller marks so that's another really positive thing that i do like and i've used the semi-solid and i was i'm brushing that on a redwood deck and it brushed out really well and it was very very easy to avoid brush strokes or lap marks so another thing i did like about the uh arbor coach you was using a solid color stain on a redwood deck that we were sanding down and we were getting most of the stain off so we're down to bare wood and when we're applying the stain it did penetrate very well and i'll talk a little bit about you know some of the things you need to do to get good penetration because prep work is you know eighty percent of the failures when it comes to paints or stains are typically related to a lack of um a preparation so you definitely want to preparate the surface or prep prep the surface very well but when we were back brushing the product in it was getting really good penetration and really good adhesion and the adhesion quality is another thing i really like about the arbor coat it adheres very very well all right so i'll talk a little bit about the adhesion qualities and i noticed that um the the products the semi solids and the solid cutter stains have amazing penetration and adhesion for a waterborne product and just a simple little thing i know it's this is not very scientific or anything but you know how well does it adhere to your skin you know typically at the end of the day we're gonna have some paint stain or whatever you know on our hands and and how well or how um easy does it actually wash off now you know what i've noticed of all my years painting i've been painting now for over 25 years that cheap inexpensive products will wash off pretty fast and easily and a lot of times without even soap and water um the the product i was using the semi-solid stain and at the end of the day i had some on my hand and it was not easy to get off i actually had to get a nylon bristle brush to scrub it off so if it sticks to your skin it's not very scientific but it would probably stick to the substrate that you're putting it on you know very well also so another thing i do like about the arbor coat is the ease of application so i've actually sprayed it through an airless sprayer i've rolled it and i've brushed it in all three applications that i've done uh it actually functions and works very very well and when it's spraying we typically spray and back brush when i was spraying it i was spraying it with a smaller tip like a five uh i think it was a 515 tip the last time i was spraying it and we were back brushing it and it sprayed back bro back brushed very well and penetrated you know into the surface area where we're doing a um house with it and then i was using it on a fence and the penetration was excellent it sprayed well there wasn't a lot of over over spray a lot of times you'll get cheap products with not very high solid contents content and when you're spraying them you'll get a lot of um overspray in the air a lot of fallout on the ground so there wasn't an excessive amount of overspray when spraying the product so you definitely can spray it you definitely can brush it and you definitely can roll it so i'll talk a little bit about um the arbor coat itself in arborico once again it's a wa the product i've been using it's a waterborne product it's a modified acrylic resin that cleans up with soap and water and it also has gen x technology and you're going to see that on the can and i'm sure a lot of people are going to say well what the heck is gen x um technology and and gen x technology is benjamin moore created their own color colorants using the gen x technology and what that does is they have zero voc products and a lot of cheap generic tents or colorants that go into paint they'll add them in they're not zero vlc so now you're adding vocs to the product so in order to keep their products at zero vlc levels they created uh gen x technology and these colorants do not have any vlcs in them so there's zero voc and these colors also remarkably resist fading so they they hold their color extremely well so you know if you want your colors to still look true you know two years from now indoors you know you definitely want to use benjamin products with gen x technology another thing about gen x technology is it makes it almost impossible for other paint stores to match their colors and i've run into that myself where we've chosen benjamin moore colors gone to a competitive paint store because the um the customer wanted a different product but they they chose a benjamin moore color and the paint store could not match the color exactly so you're running a real big risk of choosing benjamin moore colors and having it mixed into you know other products so if you choose avenger in more color or you're using a benjamin moore fan deck i would highly recommend sticking with benjen and more products due to that gen x technology so another key uh element about arbor code is arbitral we use it on wood sided homes we've used it on log homes and a lot of different wood substrates but it also can be used on a deck and so what's the difference between a solid color stain that's going to go on siding and a product that is going to go on a deck and one of the main things is scuff resistance or the ability to have something sitting on it over a long period of time and not it not sticking or tacking to the product scuff resistance is important because you got people um walking on it scuffing their feet you got furniture possibly sliding on it so you definitely want a product designed for decks and harbor coke and go on decks and um so it's horizontal and vertical services i know there's some paint stores i've used products that can only go on wood sided homes and they're a little bit cheaper than what can go on a deck but then you're having to deal with two different products and it's nice just to have one product that will go on different um surfaces vertical horizontal uh decks sighted homes or log homes etc so i've had a lot of experience doing you know decks here in the treasure valley boise idaho area and i've had a lot of experience doing decks up in the mountains that get snow loads and and one thing i'll just talk about is a water-based products that are going to get a snow load now benjamin moore products do they adhere very well and they penetrate very well for a waterborne product but if you're up in the mountains this is um where i spoke about a little bit earlier oil-based products i'm not necessarily a big fan of oil-based products because of some of the reasons i discussed but this is where i'd highly recommend using an oil-based product is up in the mountains where you're going to have standing water or you're going to have standing snow that's going to be sitting on a deck for long periods of time so what i've noticed is any waterborne products over time if they've got a snow load on them which up in the mccall area donnelly area tamarac that snow sitting on those decks it could be four months five months that it's actually sitting on there on a deck so that that's a long time for moisture um ice water to be sitting on a surface and oil-based products they do like harbor coat oil-based products they're going to penetrate deeper into the wood they're actually going to add something to the wood the oil to the wood but they protect from the inside out so you're going to get better penetration better adhesion with an oil-based product but there's you know the once again the drawbacks the cleanup you're going to have to clean up with mineral spirits um there's some environmental regulations with disposing of you know the the products um the rags and stuff and another thing i wanted to talk about is oil-based products you know dry time and this is a very key element when it comes to doing decks or siding with an oil-based product so another thing i do really like about the uh arbor coat the water-based product is the dry times the dry time to the touch is about a half hour and it does dry extremely fast so you can um it's not recommended but you can walk on it pretty quick but if you got to get somewhere across the deck or anything you could take your shoes off walk on it with socks and i've noticed we can walk on them you know one to two hours you can walk to get places as long as you walk softly you know in socks or stuff it's the dry time to the touch is a half hour it's for about four hours to re-coat and unlike oil-based products and another one of things you know kind of the drawbacks of an oil-based product is extremely long dry time so they do penetrate a lot deeper and give some better penetration and adhesion but then they do have long dry times and if you don't get any excess wiped up it can stay tacky um i've even seen oil based sparks say tacky for up to several weeks and so that can end up becoming a big problem because you can get footprints um dust can collect on it and stuff so even on sided homes log sided homes you can start getting dust piling up on tops of logs and stuff like that and it's going to stick to the oil-based products so one of the the things i really like about water-based products is the fast dry times so penetration is also you know extremely important when it comes to you know having success with any type of waterborne product or even oil-based product and and so sanding getting um you know if you can get all those all the previous coating off you want to get it off but something you want to keep in mind when it comes to using um benjamin moore's products that are arbico that if you're putting it on new wood a new wood typically has what we call a mill glaze on it and that's when the wood is sod it's um what happens is that sawing process causes the basically the wood be waterproof and so you need to break that mill glaze down and so you can get better penetration of your product so you want to do some type of sanding to break your milglaze and get good penetration and good get good adhesion and that's just a tip that um that we've noticed when it comes to using water-based products and putting them on new and new wood surfaces all right so i'm going to go over some of the key things why i really like uh arbor coat from benjamin moore and why i do highly recommend it it is the best solid color and semicolon solid color stain that i've ever used so it does hang very well so what i'm talking about that when you're spraying it brushing it rolling it it doesn't drip or sag it it hangs amazing so that's a key key thing when it you when it comes to using these products it covers amazing i think i've said it before but it covers better than any solid color or semicolo semi-solid color scene i've ever used it dries extremely fast which is important if you got overlapping colors or if you're working with a deck that you need to get on you know right away it dries fast it the penetration is absolutely amazing it penetrates very deep for a water-based product better than any product i've ever used before um the the adhesion is better than any waterborne product that i've ever used also so it it it penetrates and adheres very very well it's low overspray so when you're spraying it you don't have a lot of fallout or over spray that's going to get on plants or that's going to drift in in windy conditions and get on you know other people's houses cars etc stuff like that you can be confident spraying it um it brushes and rolls uh very effectively effectively without lap marks um and so that's pretty important and and another thing when it comes to that kind of same thing it touches up very well so if you have a light spot that you miss somewhere in a deck or on the side of a house you what i've noticed is you can touch it up and you're not going to see those touch-up spots so that's pretty important also um it doesn't say tacky so oil-based products if you don't get all the excess off that hasn't penetrated into the surface they will stay tacky for long periods of time and on a deck that could be really bad on the siding of a house it could collect dust and dirt you know if it gets if it gets windy at all before it actually dries a hundred percent and blows dust around so that's important it doesn't stay tacky it adheres very well and this is something another key point a lot of the products you're going to be doing are already painted or already stained you know previously and you don't have to sand and you don't have to strip all the way down to the bare wood it's self-priming and it's going to stick to and adhere to just about any other coating out there whether it be a paint or a stain it is low odor and that's very nice to work around brushing and rolling or even spraying it and it doesn't have a strong odor so it's very low odor and a pleasant odor and one last thing it is a zero voc so the product and the colorants that go into it it's a zero voc product so those are some of the key um reasons why i do highly recommend using arbor coat semicolon semi-solid or solid color stains so one of the things that issues we did run into when it comes to doing decks and using a water-based product and even using arbor coat is the fast dry times they are beneficial to some extent but then they can be a drawback because they can be drying extremely fast penetrating and coagulating really really fast and leaving brush strokes so you do it is recommended to always work you know not in the sun and work when it's cool so you want to work uh typically first thing in the morning or you can work late in the evening but then the surface has probably been heated up and it hasn't um cooled off enough so it's really ideal to work you know first thing in the morning and on that way you do have more working time with your products so that sometimes the dry time is a benefit but then it can be a negative thing especially if you're forced to work in the heat and work in the sun all right so i want to talk about a little bit about tan and bleed now i and using light colors when it comes to uh the arbor coat so this is um not necessarily a negative thing because this is with any paints or stains uh solid color stains semi-solid colored stains if you're staining because we do stain redwood we stain cedar those types of wood species have a lot of tannins in them so you can get tan and bleed and we were using white one time we're testing now the white and their products are self priming and which is another positive self-priming products on most substrates and um but you know if there's tannins coming through it's not going to stop tan and bleed so you…