Decking Materials Explained (Composite vs PVC vs Ipe)

hey what's going on my name is eric worrell and in today's video i'm doing a review of decking options for you if you're planning on a new home project and you want a fresh deck we're going to be talking about composites versus pvc versus ebay and also other various woods that you can use for your decking so i'm going to shoot straight with you here this video has been a bear to do and the reason for that is there's so much to consider with decking there's all these different categories then there's different brands and then there's different lines that each of those brands have what you can see right now is actually what i'm sitting above my desk here and you're seeing five different brands and 14 different samples in the scratch test that i do later in the video so what i'm going to try to do in this video is really inform and educate you on everything that i have learned from researching this and make it easy for you so that you can feel confident with the decking purchase decision that you make so what you're seeing on the screen is kind of a table of contents if there's some of these things that maybe you're already familiar with maybe you want to skip ahead in the video to get to pricing and comparison because i did spend eight and a half hours on this ridiculous spreadsheet but what it's going to do is it's going to give you pricing and it's going to be specific to all these different brands that you can see on the screen so first tip though that i have for you before you get started if you are looking at getting samples what you'll notice right here is that these two samples look pretty darn similar and the reason for that is they are the exact same sample only difference is this one cost me five dollars and took a week to get in and this one i just went to my local lumber supply store and said give me that so they gave me this one for free and then all these other composites and pvc samples you see here were completely free i went to a place called lenko lumber which is local in buffalo new york but you have a lumber supply store most likely in your area and what you can do is just give them a call and ask them if they have samples that you can have for decking they'd love to give them to you because they're free to them and then that way they hope that you purchase the lumber through them so that's my first quick tip if you're looking at samples one of the next things i want to talk about is the difference between pvc and composite so this is one that's actually a lot easier to show you than to tell you so i don't know how well this will show up on the screen here but i will give you a different angle if it doesn't and what you can see here is that the pvc one here which is the paramount line from fiber on it's a very uniform look to it when you look at the side of the board versus this trek sample which is their top of the line for trucks it has a very scattered look to it and the reason for that is the composite is actually a composite between a wood mulch a recycled wood mulch and also recycled plastic so if you're looking at a pvc very uniform when you're looking at a composite it's a little bit more chaotic looking because you have specks of wood in there and you also have the plastics now the advantage of going with a pvc over a composite is that there is no wood now from an apples to apple standpoint these are very close to each other compared to if you were to throw wood into the mixture so a wood is always going to be susceptible to insects moisture rot decay and that's just because that's what wood is and now there are various types of woods and some may be less susceptible than others but when you're really comparing that to a pvc product which has no wood it's going to be very durable and your composite is going to be a close second for durability because it's also capped so next i want to talk about the cap of the board typically it is either three-sided or four-sided so most of the selection that you're going to see is three-sided and the reason for that is when you have a three-sided cap so it's on the top and the sides what it allows you to do is if the bottom is not capped if moisture gets inside of the board it allows an area for that moisture to dissipate and disappear from if it's a four-sided cap board then if moisture gets into the board it doesn't have anywhere to go necessarily and it can be bad for the board so you might be wondering like well why would you ever have four sided them because it seems like it would cost more money to do a four-sided cap well one of them is if you have a pvc right there is no wood mulch inside of the board so you're not worried about moisture getting inside of it and then the other reason that is more common that people want a four-sided cap for is if you have a second story deck and you're going to be sitting beneath the deck maybe you want to look up and see a finished looking deck so you don't want to see that kind of unfinished underbelly and another advantage of a four-sided cap is that when you're installing it it doesn't matter which side is up there is no correct upside so you can look at the board and decide which side you like better when you're installing so now that we've talked about the profile or the difference between a three-sided or four-sided cap this is a good segue to introduce this spreadsheet that you can see on the screen right now now what this is is it's 25 different types of decking that i have done research on and this is completely free for you you don't have to opt in or give me an email or anything there's a link in the description to the spreadsheet but the trick of it is that the link is not editable so you can't filter it and you can't you know make notes on it but what you can do is when you click the link and you see this spreadsheet pop up for you you go to file and you go to make a copy so the copy that is yours that is absolutely 100 years to keep when you get the copy what you can do is you can go to the master sheet and kind of like we were just talking about like let's say you had a second story deck and you're like you know what i want four sides the cool thing about this is if you click this cell right here it highlights everything and i'm going to go to data and i know that some of this might be new to you but it's pretty easy to do i'm going to click create a filter so what that allows you to do is filter this entire spreadsheet down just by one data point so in this particular case you have a second story deck so what you'd say is that you know what i only want four sided options so i can click these check boxes here and only have four sides when i click ok just like that all you see is the four sided options so the really cool thing is you can even filter this down by other options so now if you want to you know kind of filter this by price i can go here and price a to z so now i can see what the cheapest four-sided cap board is if that's what matters to you so what this video is about is giving you as much information as possible but then this free tool that you can use to figure out what works for your needs so i'd like to highlight this information right here it says solid scalloped or both so what does that mean well solid is really easy like this is a solid board makes sense it's solid on both sides right here but this right here is a scalloped board now the reason that this is done is it saves on materials now from what i have seen you will never see a scalloped wood board and the reason for that is they're not going to save on materials because you have a piece of lumber and you'd literally be carving out some of that lumber to create a scalloped look but when it comes to composites or pvcs they can actually save on material a little bit by scalloping the bottom of it and then when they're creating the board synthetically they're saving on materials so typically what you'll find is a scalloped board is going to be a little less expensive because it's less materials so i've come across like conflicting information on if a solid board is better than a scallop board as far as like load capacity what i can say about that is that according to trex and their installation guide that it does affect the way that you're gonna build out a deck so what we're looking at here is like if you're installing trex stairs and these right here are called stringers this is you know there's four of them in this particular image and this is what your treads which are right here which is just your decking is going to be placed upon so when you're creating a stairway like this they have this maximum spacing on center of stair stringer and you'll notice that the enhanced solid profile versus the enhanced scalloped bottom have a different spacing of the stringers so this right here is actually the trex enhanced scalloped bottom and if you're using this particular board what happens is these stringers have to be nine inches apart but if you're using the same board but it was solid because they do offer this in solid or scalloped when you're using the solid board these stringers actually can be 12 inches apart and from what i understand that's just because it'll be able to support more weight so in some ways when you do go cheaper with a scalloped board there is going to be some concerns about the capacity that the board can hold and if you're creating stairs you're going to end up having more materials because you're gonna have to put in more stringers because they have to be nine inches apart instead of twelve so i just thought that that was interesting and worth noting so the next thing i wanna discuss is the difference between linear footage and square footage now you're probably familiar with square footage as i was before researching all this you know it's a 10 by 20 deck 10 foot by 20 foot you just multiply the length times width and that's going to give you your square footage which is 200. typically you also want to add about 10 percent if you're buying product because there is going to be waste so if you had a 200 square foot deck you might want like 220 square feet of decking but when it comes to linear footage it's different the way linear footage works is it's simply the measurement of length so this particular sample i got is a 12 inch by six inch sample but it's really not actually six inches it's nominal width so if this was 12 inches long and six inches wide this is actually a half of a square foot right but from a linear footage it is one foot because all you're measuring is the length when you're looking at linear so this is one linear foot but it's a half a square foot of decking so the reason this is important is because when you're actually looking at your decking and you're trying to figure out how much you need you're going to be buying decking in linear footage but you're going to also be considering how much square footage you have so we're going to get to that later in this video i have this uh cost by square footage spreadsheet here i'm going to explain that in a little bit more detail but before we get to that i want to get into also what nominal width means so if you measure any one of these samples i have most of them are going to be about 5.25 to 5 and a half inches wide but they're all marketed and sold as six inch wide boards so the reason for that is nominal width includes the gap between the boards so when you install these boards most of the time you're not going to have them butting up against each other there's going to be a little bit of a gap and that gap creates extra distance on the board so that six inch nominal width includes the gap so when you're doing your calculations and you're looking at buying lumber really it's not about the actual width of the board but it's about the nominal width how much space is that board actually going to take up now this is a good opportunity to talk about the difference between a grooved board and a solid edge board all right now it's pretty obvious here that this has a groove and this is solid now most all the boards that you select you can have an option between grooved or solid now what i found though is if you're doing it on a composite or pvc a grooved edge or a solid edge is the same price now if you're doing it on wood it's actually a little bit more expensive a lot of times with the grooved edge now the reason it's more expensive for wood is they're cutting and planing the wood to this size and then actually having to remove some of the product for you so if you do get a grooved edge on wood it's typically a little bit more expensive so now that we've looked at the difference between a groove and a solid edge why would you want to go with a grooved edge well a grooved edge allows you to use clips or fasteners between the boards this is really nice because what happens is you get a particular clip you can see one here on screen and that clip or that fastener is put between the boards and it allows you to do a couple different things the main objective of this is that you actually screw into the joist or the substructure below and you do it between the boards instead of through the boards this does a few things for you one it helps to keep the structural integrity of the board intact meaning that if you screw into a board with a screw you're making a hole into that board and if you have a cap you're giving water and moisture an opportunity to get inside of the board another nice thing is aesthetically you're not going to see any of the screws because they're going to be down deep in between the boards and the third thing that's really nice is if somehow a screw were to come up a little bit you're not going to see it you're not going to catch your feet on it now if you've walked on an old deck that was put together with nails you know those nails start to pop up and they catch toes that's not gonna happen especially when you're screwing in between the boards using a fastener or a clip now you might be wondering like why would anybody ever want to get a solid board well a lot of times if you're going with wood this particular one is sassafras from roby decking they come cheaper in a solid board now another reason why you might want a solid edge on your board is we were talking earlier about a second story deck now if you want to sit underneath that deck on a rainy day you're not going to want to have gaps between the deck and what's recommended is that you actually have the boards connect to each other as closely as you can and then what you do is you simply pitch the boards so that the water or the rain has somewhere to go and fall off the deck so that can create a canopy for you of sorts if you do have a second story deck so a solid edge with four-sided cap is best for a second story deck so i'd like to take a moment to explain the sustainability column that i have here on a one to ten score i'll be honest this is not scientific this is just based on my own research and opinion i only had 110 and that's where the promenade because it's a hundred percent pvc plastic that's recycled so but then you'll see the nines kind of correlate with the recycled material that's somewhere between 94 to 95 percent now where it gets a little bit more interesting is when you get into wood now the tough thing with wood is like the most sustainable wood out there from my understanding is bamboo because you can cut it down and it's going to grow back like a weed but it's not very good material for decking because it's very soft typically your hardwoods your tropical woods that you know coming from the rainforest like an e-bay very hard very dense very scratch resistant but at the same time not very sustainable because it takes a long time for that tree to grow to the size that they can harvest it and that's why it's so hard and dense is because of how long it takes that tree to grow before they can actually turn it into lumber now one alternative to that is black locust this came from roby ducking this is a very dense hard wood but it's also more sustainable because it can be harvested in 40 years where an ebay tree is much longer so that is something to consider if you do want to go with natural wood for your deck that a ebay wood is not the most sustainable wood so you may want to consider something like a black locust sample that you can see here one column of data that i left off intentionally on this spreadsheet is maintenance and the reason i left it off is it's pretty simple if you're going with a pvc or composite deck the maintenance is very low when these first came out in the 80s and 90s the maintenance was higher because the boards were warping and they were having issues they really resolved a lot of those issues so you can really expect 25 30 40 years out of your board depending what you go with but if you go with wood you will need to stain or oil it pretty much yearly and that's something you'll want to consider for a couple reasons because you may end up spending a saturday every year of your life staining your deck but there's also going to be a cost associated with doing that so without the gates the wood is a little bit cheaper in 10 20 years it may have actually been cheaper to go with a pvc or composite deck because it held up better didn't need to be replaced as early and didn't cost you 50 to 100 every year to stain it so there's a good chance that this column doesn't really matter too much to you but in certain cases uh you may want decking that is wui compliant so that stands for wildland urban interface basically what that means is you might be in an area that's more prone to wildfires so what you can do is if you do need wui compliant decking again if you make a copy of the spreadsheet and the link is in the description below again you just go to file make a copy what you can do is you can select all the information again by clicking the cell here and then we're going to go to data and we're going to go to create a filter and then i'm going to click on the fire hazard status and i'm going to uncheck the ones that are uh blank or no mention we're going to click ok so in this particular case now what you can do is you can see that there are five boards mentioned on here that are wi compliant it makes it a little bit easier again for you to make a decision so i'm again go back and i'm going to turn off filter so i can see all the different boards so when you click the spreadsheet the welcome screen is going to look something like this and one of the things that you may want to go to is the cost by square footage tab which is down here so when you get to this right here what you're going to have to do is just implement three pieces of data and that's going to give you the cost for your decking minus railings railings can get pretty confusing because you might have a very unique deck with a lot of railings or in my particular case what you're looking at are the plans here my deck that i'm planning on building has very few railings so that's why i left that data point off but i want you to start with your deck budget now i think it's good to do this first so that you're not looking at the information and trying to force yourself into a decision start with a budget and then work within that so let's say your budget is 2500 now what you can do is figure out what the square footage of your deck is i think earlier we talked about like a 10 foot by 20 foot deck would be 200 square feet but if you add 10 percent again that's just for like waste material waste then that 200 becomes 220 so we're gonna go like that and then the third data point that we want to add is your state sales tax if you're not familiar with what that is you can google it i'm in new york state so i can say you know what is the sales tax in new york it's 8 so what you're going to go on this data here is just put eight and enter and that's important because it's going to put it into a percentage automatically so what this spreadsheet does step by step is this cell here is figuring out what your linear footage needs are and since we're using a six inch board in this particular example it's really just double what your square footage is so we need 440 linear feet at a six inch width board so this next row here it's cost of clips or fasteners so assuming that you are going to go with a grooved edge and you need clips or fasteners such as these what i have found is they're typically about 75 to 90 cents per square foot of the project so in this particular case we have 220 square feet realistically it'll probably end up being around like 175 dollars but just to be safe what i did is i figured a dollar per square foot just over on the safe side with your costs now the next row here is cost of wood substructure is five dollars per square foot plus your tax so how i arrived at five dollars per square foot of substructure and if you're not familiar substructure that's just what you're seeing on the images on the screen right now that's really what you're going to be screwing into that is the structure beneath your decking uh what i found from trex is that they said it's about five dollars per square foot of wood substructure and the way i got to that is they have this calculator that you can use for cost calculating costs for your trucks decking and they ask you a question they say what type of substructure material will you use if you do wood i did this quote which is a hundred square feet they uh estimated that it would be about 500 us dollars for the substructure so that's where i came up with that five dollars per square foot and then again what i did is i just multiplied it by your state sales tax too to give you a little bit more accurate read so why don't we just do one thing why don't we remove the state sales tax because you'll notice that as soon as i add the state sales tax in all these numbers below become eight percent higher all right so if we make this zero i want to show you where i got all these numbers from so in this particular case we're looking at the fibron concordia symmetry right if you go to home depot you'll find that they have this board available and what i did is i always tried to use a 12 foot board by 6 inch nominal width and i just take this number and divide it by 12 and that equals this number right here which is 455 but when you add in your state sales tax you will notice that that 455 number jumps up a little bit by 8 percent so this is where i'm getting these numbers from is typically home depot or lowe's when you get into the wood at the bottom here with roby ducking and advantage lumber these are direct from their website and what they list their pricing as and i did it based on a one inch depth a six inch width and with a grooved edge so that's important to notice here one inch depth six inch width with a pre-grooved edge so if we hop over to the next row here for decking all these numbers are calculated simply by taking the linear foot what does it cost per linear foot and it's multiplying it times the amount of linear feet you need for this project and then if you're adding the decking plus clips it's simply taking this number and then adding it to your cost of clips or fasteners to get that number so now if you need decking clips and substructure what it's doing is it's taking this number and then it's adding in your substructure that is figured out automatically with the spreadsheet to give you your number over here so if you have your own version of this spreadsheet and you're looking at your situation you're like i already have a substructure so i'm not even worried about this column uh what you would do is you go to decking and clips and then you can just kind of take a look and say you know what what fits within my budget and if you want i mean you can even just delete out certain rows if you wanted to you can delete out that information and filter down the data that way so i mentioned earlier i spent about eight and a half hours on this spreadsheet probably about five hours of it was just on this particular tab looking up all these prices uh these prices will fluctuate so this is as i'm making this video september 18 2020 keep that in mind but if you do see things that you think are a little bit out of whack because it's possible that i made a mistake in some spot put it in the comments below this video and what i'll do is i'll go back and i'll actually update this spreadsheet for people that are getting it so one of the things i should mention is that this particular spreadsheet does not account for any fascia that you may be buying all of these boards always offer a fascia board so it's usually a board that is much wider and it's used for the edges of your deck right so it's just kind of giving that nice kind of capped feel on the edges so like taking a look at this particular deck that i did with trex you can see the railings it said it was going to be probably 30 feet because it's going to go on the outside right here assuming that your deck is butting up to your house well in that particular case you might need 30 feet of fascia board approximately you probably you know up it to 34 feet just to be safe so then you can kind of get an idea of what that's going to cost you in this particular example if you needed about 34 feet uh you're probably looking at about needing four of these boards so it might add about 200 250 to your price so just something to consider but again that's very specific and nuanced to your specific deck project so this is where you want to kind of apply the spreadsheet to your specific situation to help filter down the amount of boards that you're going to select from so hypothetically you have a 2500 budget let's say you don't need a substructure you peeled up your old decking the substructure is fine you're just trying to give it a refresh you don't need railings but you are going to have some fascia that you're going to need so like we just talked about roughly 250 bucks so what i would do is i go down to this column and start to look at what board is closest to 2 250 and what i'm finding is probably this one right here is 2306 again that's going to leave us a little bit of wiggle room for uh fascia and what i would do is i'd go across over here so we know that the roby decking sassafras which is probably the most fun board out of all these to say so we're going to head over here to the master sheet and you can see if you go to the ruby decking sassafras that it's 439 a linear foot so that's really the max we want to pay so we're going to do again is go here click in this cell here and then go to data create a filter and then one of the cool things too is that you can price this not only a to z or z to a you can also filter by a condition so what i'm going to do is a drop down and i'm just going to go and you can see all these different things you can do here all i'm going to say is less than or equal to and then i'm going to put equals 4.39 so it should just give us any and all boards that are 439 or less per foot so you can see that i did that perfectly here and then as i mentioned earlier you can get into other kind of uh filters that you can add in after that so in this particular case how about we say we want a board that is 439 a linear foot or less and then also for sustainability what i'm going to do is i want nines and tens shown so let's see so now what you can see are these are all uh nine for sustainability and then less than 439 a linear foot and then if you even wanted to go a little bit further what you can do is you can see okay well warranty in yours why don't we take a look you can see that this particular board is 388 per linear foot it is a 9 for sustainability and has a 40 for warranty in yours so that might be a board that you want to check out in your particular case if these are the things that matter to you so i know this video is getting long but i've got a little golden nugget for you for staying on and what i want to talk about now is the welcome screen the first tab that you're going to see when you open up this spreadsheet there's a link down here and if you want you can click that link and you can type in your information your email and that's going to add you to our email list of any kind of deck deals that i can secure i'm going to share with you now why would these manufacturers do that now if you're familiar with the groupon business model all they do is they pretty much create an email list and then try to go to restaurants service providers different uh kind of companies and ask for a deal and in exchange they will email their list about that deal well that's what i'm building right here is i'm going to build up a list of people like yourself and myself included and try to get a deal on decking so whatever kind of current promotion or deal that i can secure from these manufacturers for decking i will share that with you via email so that's pretty easy it's right on the welcome screen here so in the next video i'm going to share with you actually which product i went with and why i'm going to show you what the completed project looks like so you'll be able to click that video on the screen but in the meantime before i have that project done there will be a video on the screen that youtube is suggesting to you that it's going to be very helpful if you're looking at buying decking all right guys i will catch you in that next video

Channel: Buyers Guide

Views: 46,117

Rating: 4.9788361 out of 5

Keywords: decking material, composite vs pvc decking, decking buyers guide, decking cost estimates

Id: _YUnwLDgb2I

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020