Ipe vs. Composite vs. PVC vs. Cedar: Which Decking is Best?

on the build show today it looks like we're doing an infomercial that actually we're gonna be doing some real-world deck testing I've got four common deck boards here and we're gonna put them through a series of tests the things that happen on your deck on an everyday basis things like spills and scratches and stains today's video is sponsored by our forensic Azek let's get going on the build show today real-world deck testing we're gonna put these four common deck boards through a series of tests and see how they're really going to perform in your backyard so let me show you the four that we're working with number one we're gonna be using cedar now cedar is a softwood used all over the country beautiful wood it Gray's out really nicely but in this case we wanted to give it a little bit of resistance when we got into the stain testing portion so we put one coat of sickens on that next IPE I've used a lot of IPE over the years if you're not familiar with that it is a tropical hardwood extremely dense very very resistant to decay and rot and we put one coat of oil on this as well in IPE oil next we're going to be using timber tech this is a composite wood and if you're not familiar with this it's a mix of both wood and plastic HDPE specifically and there's a lot of recycled content in this but this is what's considered a capped composite meaning there's a virgin polyethylene cap all the way around that timber Tech which is going to give it some additional resistance in these tests and then the last board here is a zyk now ASIC is a cellular PVC product the first thing we're going to do here is stain test so let's get going on that okay the first test stains let's see what some common foods that you're gonna be eating on your backyard deck are gonna due to these four common deck boards so first we're gonna start with these guys right here catch-up and mustard you know you're using these at every party in the back of your deck invariably somebody's gonna spill these so first we hit mustard and we gave a nice puddle on each one of these boards next we moved on to catch-up and same thing we know we left a nice little puddle there okay next up I didn't spare any expenses I didn't bring the box wines from home I stopped and got the good wine from the store to splash on these deck boards now a splash of wine on a deck my expectation is we're gonna see some differences between these so we splashed a little bit on each one of these and by the way I brought in a fourth piece or pardon me a fifth piece as well I brought a control sample of some unfinished cedar I just flipped over this side that had the sickens on it and on the backside I hit the red wine and then last is gonna be the burger and I think this is the one that I've seen on my in law's deck the most when it comes to stayin äj-- so we took some some regular old hamburgers from the local shop flip the patty side down and pop out in each one of these including the unfinished cedar now here's the way I did though I didn't want to just wipe these up immediately I didn't forget was necessarily a fair test so I moved on to the scratch test and then we're gonna come back and wipe these off later so next let's talk about scratching so scratching this can happen certainly under construction but I think also moving deck furniture around is a typical place where you might find a scratch let's see what a screw does for these now I lined up all four boards together so that I could try to give a consistent pressure with my thumb and made a series of four or five scratches across here no shock that the cedar gave the most deep and impressionable scratch the really the most noticeable soft wood pretty normal that you're gonna see it scratch pretty easily IPE you know super dense super hardwood you were able to get a small scratch on there but really not much at all and then the timber tech in the Azek I'll be honest they surprised me a little bit they were much harder and much more dense than I expected them to be now we've made a scratch across the grain on the timber Tech in the Azek and they scratched about the same as what I expected maybe slightly more than the IPE but way way less than the cedar now here's an interesting tip for you though the ASIC rep was here earlier today and showed me that you can actually fix a scratch on the Azek and I didn't know this because it's got some memory to it if you apply heat to a scratch depending on the size of scratch of course if it's a more minor scratch you can actually get rid of it and so I did some testing on that I was shocked to find out you actually could we took a heat gun and we heat it up we actually let it preheat for about two minutes on the very highest setting and the exact people tell me it needs to get to like 850 degrees but here's the key you got to move that heat quickly and you want to keep it about two inches from the deck board don't stay there in fact I practiced on a scrap board first and I was able to burn through it by accident so I knew that I needed to keep my wand moving that tip of that heat gun but check this out I mean you move that he you can across that scratch I was impressed you could really make it just about disappear not perfect but sure is gonna diminish the look of that scratch without a zach and a heat gun again practice on a scratch on a spare board don't don't go right to your deck or you've got a scratch and do it right in the middle your deck because you can damage that with too much heat okay now about an hour later we came back to that stain test and I think this is a much more real world if everything's left on that deck for an hour that's gonna give it time for to soak in and cause that damage and first let's start with the cedar I took the burghers away first and then I started wiping from there and right away you could tell obviously on the unfinished cedar we got we got a problem I mean that that red wine absolutely stained and I think that's gonna be really hard to get out the burger left a nice grease mark in there as well interestingly enough though the sickens finish on the cedar boy it protected it really well the only thing that got past it was the red wine and you can see we've got a bit of a red wine mark here not terrible but if that if that red wine was let's say left out overnight rather than just for an hour I think it'd be even much more pronounced now the IPE seemed to soak in but after I wiped it down with soap and water it wasn't as bad the red wine I think would absolutely soaked in given more time and interesting enough you can see just a little bit of that ketchup and mustard on there timber tech I'll tell you this was impressive after I wiped it down with a paper towel and then used a little bit of dish soap water on there I don't see a thing on that that looks money absolutely brand-new even after an hour of soaking in and the A's X similarly everything did really well cleaning off that Azek however one little Achilles here that I found is that that yellow mustard you can still see a haze from that kind of a yellowish haze even after wiping it off my assumption is that there is vinegar in here which somehow is making some reaction with that PVC if given enough time interesting I didn't see that on the timber tech but I did see that in the ASAC I don't know maybe I had a flawed test but but I did find that the mustard left a little bit of a problem everything else no problem all okay let's move on to the bug spray and the sunscreen test now this one I've had personal experience with as well when I'm out at the lake with the kids I've seen the kids spray their feet down and after they leave with the sunscreen you can absolutely see the two foot marks on the deck where their feet were in the bug spray or the sunscreen has marred it so we went a little extreme on this test now we did this test for several days in a row where we absolutely glazed the boards we shall act him with both of these we did it on Thursday we left him in the Sun all day we did it on Friday we left him the Sun all day on Saturday again and in the Sun all day and then today first thing we did we put another coat on all these boards now we use the B in the S and tape so we can kind of see what they look like later that stands for a bug or sunscreen also kind of nice that it stands for build show as well so then once we glazed them for that fourth time what I did was I pulled the tape on these and again we let him sit out in the Sun for a couple more hours after I did that this morning we pulled the tape and man that was slightly disgusting I got to say that sunscreen left a giant film on those boards so I'm interested to see after they got clean what they look like and then the bug spray pretty disgusting as well I was a giant mess on these boards after several days of that now what I did first was I scrubbed him down you know I used just some regular old dawn kitchen soap a couple of drops in a little bucket of water and then I washed each one of them down and you could see as I wash them down for instance the sunscreen on the cedar which had that PPG sickens finish kind of gummed up and you could tell it was coming off on there now on the other hand the sunscreen on the IPE oil didn't come off very well in fact you can see perfectly that s on there and it's kind of a nasty I don't know what exactly happened I assume that there's some kind of reaction with the sunscreen in the IPE oil I really could not get that off easily I think you'd have to powerwash this to actually get that off the timber tech cleaned off relatively easily on the sunscreen and the bug spray although if you look at the sunscreen on this timber tech board you can see that it's mess with the sheen of little bit I don't know if that's because I wasn't able to fully get that sunscreen off or if it actually did something to the finish in the board not totally certain there now the ASIC had a slightly surprising result and I'm not sure if it has anything to do with my tape but you can see the outline here of my be in my s where I tape those over and again there's a little bit of a sheen difference where the sunscreen was the bug spray seemed to leave an outline of that be on there I think the big takeaway on this is look if you've got sunscreen or bug spray there in a metal can for a reason they're chemicals and they're gonna mess with your deck about the only one of these that that took a licking and kept on ticking was the cedar with that PPG sickens I thought that one did really really well but the other three here we definitely have some some things going on that are not good now the guys at ASIC tell me that they're decking has this alloy armor technology that's gonna make the surface of this much more resistant to the bug spray and the sunscreen damage then even the product a couple years ago this is fairly new technology in the product today they didn't used to have but I think the takeaway on this test is look be really careful you shouldn't be using those products on your deck they can cause damage so you should spray those down on the grass and then come on the deck later okay so what are the takeaways after a days with the testing and all these boards you know I've put a lot of wood decks down over the years and I love the look and feel of real wood but it does have its downsides and we got to see some of that today however I think one of the big takeaways frankly is that ASIC and timber tech they've come a long ways considering the composites I was putting down 10 years ago that I have kind of the most direct and personal experience with this capped composite with timber tech did really well on the tests and the cellular PVC with Azek very impressive product I had no idea that it was this impervious to so many things I think we've got some really good choices out there if you're planning a deck project hopefully you learn something that will apply to your specific project and you can choose a good deck no matter what deck you choose I want to recommend my friends at timber town that's whose warehouse we're in today and they're the dealer locally for all these products I also want to thank a sec for being man enough to sponsor the video and also show the downsides of their products as well not just a hundred percent positive on those so big thanks to those guys as well link in the description below for both of those companies I talked about if you're not already a subscriber I'd love to have you subscribe to the build show we publish every Tuesday and every Friday false on Twitter Instagram all the lies we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 766,221

Keywords: deck testing, azek, ipe decking, azek decking, timbertech, cedar decking, matt risinger, the build show

Id: NDoSt5ErCSA

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018