I need to paint two doors, a garage door, and about 75 feet of board fence (both sides) this summer. I think it may be time to buy a “power painter”, but I don’t know anyone who has had one.
If you have experience with this kind of tool, do you believe it was a big time-saver? Is it easy to clean and maintain the painter? Are there restrictions on the types of paint you can use? (The fence needs sealant, not paint). Is there a big difference in performance between the el cheapo painters you buy and the better quality ones you rent? And finally, are there any brands or models you would recommend or not recommend?
There are power rollers and sprayers, so I’m not sure which you mean. Sprayers can be kind of messy, and definitely do an inferior job to a brush or roller. I wouldn’t spray any of the jobs you mentioned. Maybe the garage door, but probably not. Overspray sucks and I’d rather cut in the windows (if there are any) than mask them.
Power rollers are generally used wherever traditional rollers are. They are nice, and save time and drips. I don’t think I’d roll many fences, but it kinda depends on the fence. It would probably be useful for the garage door. Probably worthwhile in the long run if you own a house, but I wouldn’t buy one based only on the jobs in question.
After re-thinking things, 75’ of fence x2 is not negligible. A sprayer may be in order. For the fence, I’d probably thin some polyurethane by about half, maybe a bit less. If you go that way, I’d use if for the garage door as well. I wouldn’t use it on the house doors.
I believe he’s referring to this specific brand/model of sprayer.
I got a cheap one last year, because I was painting something with an extremely uneven surface. It worked great. However, both the prep and cleanup took longer than when using a brush and roller. First you really do have to mask off everything in the area you don’t want painted. Then you have to prime the thing on cardboard or newspaper until it sprays evenly, which used up a lot of cardboard. At the end you put in warm water and soap (if using latex paint!) and spray some more cardboard until all the soapy water is gone. (If using non-latex paint, you have to buy some kind of paint thinner and use that for cleaning.)
The paint job is nice and even, though. It did exactly what I wanted on the uneven concrete and cinder-block surface.
If you’re referring to a Wagner – under no circumstances should you buy one. They’re pretty much junk. Worse than that, they’re junk that * almost * works. So you might get 30 feet of your fence done quickly and neatly. And then the machine will burp, spit, and throw half a pint of paint at the wall in huge spatters. Rinse, repeat.
I bought one a while back figuring that they’d eventually have worked the bugs out, but like most of the people who review them on Amazon, I found that they haven’t and apparently don’t intend to.
Renting a pro-quality machine would be a better idea.
I got a smoking deal a few years back on a Wagner and it works great (it was a couple steps up from their base model, which I hear is/was junk). I can have mine cleaned and put away in like 15-20 minutes, not much longer than it takes to rinse brushes, pans, etc. It does require more prep work, mainly to provide extra coverage for overspray. Whether it’s worth it depends upon the type of job. I mainly use it on our 2 balconies and our deck, and it probably takes about 1/10 the time compared to manually painting them. Of course, this job is outside with only a few places to worry about overspray and has 80-100 posts (4 sided). If I were doing an interior room, I would most likely just use a roller and brush (I do have a roller attachment, but never tried it).
The fence sounds like a good sprayer job. If you only need to paint it every once in a while and don’t see too many other uses for a sprayer, I would definitely rent.
So you don’t have a cadre of barefoot neighborhood kids available to paint the fence for you?
Try stepping up to a pro model. They work fantastically! Sure, they’re a few bucks, but if you consider your time and future painting projects, then they can be a real (non-monetarily-speaking) investment, like many tools.
Well, the last boy I had paint it somehow got every kid in the neighborhood begging to paint a couple of boards. That kid was a real character. Later, he ran off with the son of the town drunk on some kind of adventure, and the whole town thought they were drowned, but they turned up alive later, at their own funeral. Then the two of them found a big box of gold in a cave near the river. It was powerful strange, I tell you.