Too Hot To Paint My Home’s Exterior?
Posted on June 2, 2020
Summer is the traditional season to take on exterior painting jobs, but with the mercury climbing high, are you risking your paint job? Water-based exterior paint requires certain conditions to cure properly and if you paint outside of those temperatures, you could risk your finish. So when is it too hot to paint my home’s exterior? Risking it could mean repainting sooner than you’d like.
Most homeowners are aware that it can be too cold to apply paint on your home, but the opposite can cause issues too. Paint needs several days to cure before achieving the final film. Temperatures that are too high, too low or too wet will all inhibit the paint. Worse yet, you might not immediately know any impairments have happened. It could show up several years down the line when cracking and peeling starts to prematurely crop up.
Temperature Limits
Professional painters agree there is no hard fast rule about what temperature is too high. With the numbers soaring into the 90s regularly, surface temperatures can absorb the heat and register even hotter numbers.
Our crews recommend a touch test. If you can’t put the palm of your hand on the wall for more than a few seconds, it’s too hot to try to paint. Manufacturers print recommendations on their paint cans with ideal temperature ranges. Rather than paint when it’s hot and risk the job failing, put off your painting until a cooler day.
How Temperature Affects Drying
High temperatures can cause paint to form a film too quickly. This means the underneath paint is not able to dry before the seal is formed against the air. Problems with this include messy sliding of the paint, rippling and peeling.
Humidity
Not only will too much heat ruin a perfectly good paint job, humidity can creep in too. High humidity can cause a different set of problems with paint films. Most notably, you could experience surfactant leaching, where a brown or white discoloration shows up on the surface of the paint. Another issue is the drying of your newly painted wall. High humidity can introduce water from the air onto the film that is trying to dry. This prolongs the drying and ruins the paint.
How Humidity Affects Drying
High humidity means high moisture content in the air. This means it takes longer for the water in the paint to evaporate. This traps the moisture under the paint film and causes failure in the coating on your home.
Schedule with us
Our teams are experts at knowing the proper temperatures to paint in. They will ensure that your paint coating turns out beautifully and lasts. Schedule a free, no-obligation estimate to discuss your project today.
