Aluminum or vinyl siding

[Ian Gills]

I have just had a guy come past offering to repaint my aluminum siding and take the stain from the old, fading paint off the bricks.

He swears that aluminum siding is better than replacing with new vinyl.

Is he mad?

[cacher_chick]

I have vinyl and really dislike it. No matter the grade, it still looks like plastic junk to me.

[Dana]

Aluminum siding is forever, except in the salt air of coastal marine climates. It doesn't sag or melt even under the most intense heat it'll ever likely encounter. In my neighborhood low-E sealed windows on neighboring houses have been sufficient solar concentrators to ruin vinyl forever.

The main issue with painting aluminum will be the quality of the type of paint and it's bond to the existing finish, but like automotive paints on steel, a decent paint job on aluminum can also look good pretty much forever (or at least a few decades.) I've seen 30-40 year old aluminum siding holding up well with the original finish, 10 years + on a quality re-paint.

Paints hold up much better on metal siding than on wood, since unlike with wood, there's no water-vapor pressure from the substrate working to crack or blister it off. (But even on wood siding, back-priming the siding and installing it with a rainscreen gap between the siding and the structural sheathing more than doubles the lifespan of the paint from a peeling-integrity point of view.)

[Ian Gills]

Thanks guys. Great points.

The guy also wants to clean my bricks with some special chemical and coat the bricks in a clear coat so the aluminum paint staining (when it comes off) won't happen again.

Is this worth it? It costs a lot of $$$s.

[Cookie]

Nope, unless you got the bucks to waste.
BUT, what it might be good for is to waterproof them. ( I did my bricks for this reason under my deck) and, it also, might hold your mortar in better. I had to have certain parts of my bricks remortared ( pointed?) due to ice damage. Tell him to use the right stuff for this purpose and you just might kill 2 birds with one stone.