Our condo units are long overdue for new sidings. We have wood now, but the wood was installed “green” and despite much piece meal repairs, they are still defective in many respects. The buildings were constructed in 1983 and still have the initial wood sidings. Our property manager recommends Hardiplank over vinyl as he claims vinyl looks like crap and Hardiplank will last forever. We have 40 units and this would require a special assessment of $3600 per unit ($100 a month for 3 years). Some of us are not able to afford that. Vinyl would be much cheaper.
I’m all for the Hardiplank since it’s reputed to last for at least 50 years and has the look of wood. However, somebody told me that it has to be painted every 7 years. If that’s so, IMHO vinyl would be better. I do not know if GQ is the proper forum, but this is a factual question. Does Hardiplank have to be painted every 7 years?
Few people install vinyl nowadays unless they really can’t afford anything else. It’s easily damaged and will melt if you get the BBQ too close. I hate the stuff.
When I was the director of a public housing construction division, we ONLY installed Hardieplank as replacement or new siding, and this was in some of the worst imaginable climate conditions.
Hardieplank (named for James Hardie) works as advertised. The difference between the old way of installing it and the new way, is that installers no longer have to caulk the joints between the planks. Caulking was always the weak point with this product, as even the best stuff would eventually dry up, fall out, and have to be replaced. Because the siding paint will fade over time (as with most surfaces), painting the replacement caulk joints never matched the siding color, so unless you wanted your house to look like a patchwork quilt, you had to repaint the entire thing. Getting rid of the caulk joints solved that issue. There are now metal mounting strips behind the siding that serve the same purpose as the caulk. Caulking still has to be done around windows, etc., but it’s a 1/8" bead.
The Color Plus siding has a 15 year warranty before repainting. If they side it with just the primed version and then paint it afterward, then the paint is only as good as the company that manufactured it.
You don’t even need a BBQ to warp or melt vinyl siding. There have been countless cases of siding melting, warping or bubbling when the sun is reflected off a neighbor’s windows. IMO, it’s bottom of the barrel cheap stuff.
Hardiplank at least is installed like, and looks like traditional clapboard siding, but should last longer.
Hardie (and other cementitious siding) also has good fire resistance, far superior to any other siding material.
Vinyl melts fast when exposed to heat, exposing the sheathing to flame very quickly. From what I have seen it is worse than both aluminum and cedar for fire resistance. Vinyl also fades over the years so it really doesn’t even have that as an advantage over Hardie. It is easily damaged by hail and impacts of any sort. Its only advantage is its price.
I think the Hardie plank info has been covered pretty well.
People like to crap on vinyl but it is very good value for what it is. Doesn’t look as nice and will have issues but it cleans up easy and it’s dirt cheap compared to anything else. It installs faster than anything else. Even if you have to replace it all a few times your still below the cost of other materials.
Your title mentioned aluminum which I think is the worst siding you could use. It’s not cheap. It’s loud. It damages easy. It looks like vinyl. Paint never lasts on it.
I was an early adopter of Hardiplank, which was installed on my then-new residence in 1995. (So, minor caveat: I was painting unpainted hardiplank.) Even though Hardiplank was a new product I found a paint manufacturer down in Los Angeles who had a product formulated for cementitious material. Using that I primed and painted my house myself – in 1995. It is still holding up well in 2015. So well, in fact, that even though I no longer like the colors the Hardiplank material-paint combination is holding up so well I don’t want to cover it yet.
We remodeled/rebuilt our home over the past 2 years and it seems as though there are only 2 camps remaining in the construction contracting world: those that use Hardieplank, and those that use LP SmartSide.
Each of them love to tell you all of the shortcomings of the other, but after doing our own research, we went with the SmartSide.