Your deck will thank you by looking better and performing better and potentially adding many years of extended lifetime to your whole deck structure. if left untreated and unchecked, mold problems can lead to decay and potentially cause serious safety and structural issues with the entire deck structure. The correct way to resolve mold issues with different types of decking materials varies widely. Plastic decking, which is 100 percent recyclable such as Azek, looks like wood. It might expand and contract in certain climates, loosening joints and making decks unstable.

Trex Composite Decking Company Information

• Some capstock manufacturers, such as Fiberon and Timbertech, now guarantee some of their products against excessive fading.
• Capstock deck boards, with their plastic shell, fade less than uncapped composite boards.
• Although some capstock and plastic deck manufacturersNote 1 insist that their products do not fade, the empirical evidence is to the contrary.
• On their own website and in their own literature they state decking will fade and even give guidelines in their warranty regarding how much fading should occur and how much would be covered.
• Most will fade a little bit because the exposed material is plastic, the fading is minimal.

I just received my TREX offer letter in the mail. The offer is to cover the cost of the boards and $13.00 extra.(I presume for labor.) A custom designed and built deck and the labor to replace faulty material is worth $13? TREX and the lawyers are really making out well off the backs of the people. I feel sorry for people in corporations that can live like that.

Decking

Probably the first thing a homeowner will notice is white spots on the deck. These are exposed wood particles bleached by the sun and rain. This is a sure sign that the deck's seal has been damaged. Exposed particles, besides creating unsightly white spots, swell when they get wet, and can cause the decking to split and degrade over time. It is simply not possible to keep the plastic from being worn away or compromised by UV.

“As my dogs walked across the deck, it left paw prints, which I immediately tried to sweep and then simply hose off, without success. So the only way to keep the deck clean is to scrub it with warm soapy water every time it gets dirt on it. My old wooden deck was painted and lasted 30 years. I could just go out and sweep most of the dirt off and hose most everything else. The only time I needed to scrub anything was when I’d spill something greasy.” Says Marnie of Corning, CA. How mold and mildew get a foothold is well understood.

I had no receipts or proof of purchase, but did have an end tag which I photographed and sent to them with photos of the deck along with the claim form which I downloaded from the internet. Within a few weeks an inspector showed up to inspect the damage and submitted a report. A couple weeks later I received a letter from Trex offering me total replacement of the deck materials and 18 cents per lineal foot for labor. Admittedly, the labor payment is a joke, but they are shipping me more material than needed to place the entire deck. Had contractor build deck in 2006 and noticed after the summer of 2008 that some of the boards looked odd - discolored and blistered. After the winter (very mild - not much rain) I noticed that the boards were actually decaying - just flaking off like cardboard. I contacted Trex and they had me fill out a claims form which I did and they sent out an adjuster to inspect the deck.

ormal use of the deck wears off the protective plastic coating that surrounds the wood particles in the composite, leaving them exposed to mold and mildew. They look like composites, but these boards are actually 99 percent virgin PVC plastic, very different stuff from the polyethylene-wood mix found in most composites. Run-of-the-mill boards start at $4 per square foot, while the premium products that closely resemble tropical wood run up to $7.20 per square foot. VEKADECK is the best deck board in the entire vinyl decking industry.

And this difference is even more pronounced if the natural wood is harvested from managed forests. By comparison to real wood, however, composite materials are a distant second on the greenness scale. All composites also use an enormous amount of power to manufacture and the generation of that electricity is a primary source of greenhouse gases. This "embedded energy" as it is called by environmental folks, detracts substantially from the products' greenness. So, while it is true that most composites do not need staining, the choice may be to live with the ugly gray faded color of an unstained deck or bite the bullet and stain.

Trex Composite Decking Reviews: Transcend, Enhance And Select

Warnings Issued For Trex Decking

Each line boasts a cap that resists mold, mildew, and moisture damage and offers superior surface protection. Some competitors offer capped composites, but take board-compromising shortcuts to help pinch pennies. Fungi can be in black, white, green, yellow, fuzzy, slick, multi-cellular or single-celled; mold takes all shapes and forms. While mold only needs moisture to live, spores love organic materials to feast upon.

Recently, I had to repair a poorly designed front porch that was covered with Trex decking. I would like Trex to pay for the replacement boards - which is a small portion of the total deck, like about 7-10 boards as well as pay the contractor for his time. This company refuses to acknowledge their warping issues with their composite deck boards. For our early generation composite decking , Trex does not recommend the use of a power washer. Use of a power washer will damage the decking surface and will void the warranty with respect to any condition caused by the power washing. In most cases, individual Elevations' components cost more than pressure-treated wood components. The Elevations steel deck framing system does offer efficiencies not found with wood, including the ability to build longer spans and extend cantilevers with Elevations joists and beams.

These are the conditions that mushrooms, mold and fungus seem to thrive in. Trex had a class action lawsuit which stated they needed to replace my deck that was bad with the material choice they gave me and they paid shipping. They had a third party estimator come out to estimate product required. The installer came and looked at it in July and was also puzzled as he'd never seen anything like this before, and I said I would try the Deck Brightener. At that point I told him to pull out those boards and replace them since Trex did not seem interested in resolving this. I can certainly send a piece of it to Trex if they want it, but at this point I'm so disappointed with Trex. At my previous residence I had installed a Trex deck when Trex was in it's first generation.

And while their customer service and warranty department could be better, they do offer a good warranty which will protect you if major defects occur. Skimp on any of these 3 issues and you could have problems down the road. Trex has absolutely had problems in the past but their constantly trying to improve and perfect their decking products. With each failure they’ve learned a lesson and improved the product.

The plastic in the composite mix is compromised, and water gets past the protective plastic and into the wood flour. This means that special processes must be used in manufacturing and installing composite decks to account for this un-wood-like expansion and contraction. For guidance, we can look to the experience of the vinyl siding industry that has been contending with the problems of plastic expansion for over a half-century. Many of the techniques of installing composite decks are taken from the vinyl siding professionals. But, there are still many problems that have not yet been conquered. In our heat retention tests, dark stained wood was typically Fahrenheit 5° to 10° (Celsius 2.8° to 5.6°) hotter than natural, unstained wood.