Care And Maintenance Of Wood Plastic Composite Decking

This dual-sided composite decking features a natural wood grain with two colour options in one - giving you the freedom to be creative with your decking design. The ‘capped’ outer layer creates a protective barrier to help protect against fading and weathering, ensuring a long life. The hollow construction makes this board lightweight and helps with heat absorption. These boards are secured with end clips, which are then screwed in place - this gives you a seamless finish with no fixings on show. All ecodek products have received a ‘carbon negative’ status in the production of their composite decking boards, making them an ideal choice for eco-conscious developments.

What Is Capped Composite Decking?

Imagine having brunch out in the open and or an evening gathering of close friends. Composite is one of the popular choices when you want to install a deck in your home. Homeowners get various advantages from composite decking such as durability and inexpensive maintenance. One question that comes up when installing a composite deck is whether to leave spacing between boards.

Why Choose Composite Over Traditional Timber?

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Composite boards are specially formed with recycled wood and polyethylene, heated to a set temperature to form together and shaped into the boards you see today. The addition of a capped layer ups the price due to production costs, but it’s thanks to this that you can enjoy a more stress-free decking experience with more weather protection. What’s more, there is less fear of needing replacement decking boards or repairs due to splintering, cracking, warping, and quicker discolouration. This allows us to be versatile with the colours we recommend – many of our clients choose to design areas of their decking in accordance with how it would be used and where the decking is positioned. Choosing an Ash colour for extra sunny spots is often the perfect solution.

When using non-capped boards, make sure they have a deep non-slip grain or ribbed texture. Check the boards are made from high density plastic products and hardwood fibres. This will keep the board safe and one that will last for years to come. You will need to keep all deck areas clean, but capped and high grade composites are always recommended to reduce the amount of maintenance needed. The capping also enables a wood grained effect decking to be an effective nonslip deck.

All types of decking, when exposed to summer sun over long periods of time will absorb some degree of heat. Whether that's natural timber decking, IPE decking, plastic decking or composite decking. The latter, however, will definitely retain heat for the least amount of time as a result of the advanced technologies that go into producing it. To have the best time outdoors, choose light-colored composite decking boards with a hollow core since these are more resistant to extreme temperature and moisture. They closely resemble wood when it comes to heat retention and dissipation whilst offering all the benefits of composite decking. All kinds of material soak up heat when exposed to direct sunlight.

• The makers of composite decking mix those materials in a factory with an adhesive and heat the mixture until they combine to form composite decking boards.
• When you think of what your decking is up against, you can see how wooden decking is vulnerable to the effects of rain, snow, frost, heat, pests and insects and this isn’t even mentioning wear and tear.
• What the material is ready, they cut them into various shapes so that homeowners can use them to build outdoor decking.
• Some cheaper composite decking boards still have this problem, but when you are dealing with high-quality composite boards like ours here at Ecoscape, you don’t have such a problem with it.
• Being a particular mixture of recycled materials, such as wood and plastic, automatically merits composite decking with a high level of protection that isn’t naturally present in timber decking.

Composite decking boards get hotter under the sun based on the amount of heat or solar energy they absorb and not reflect. The heat retained by your composite decking partly depends on the material it is made of. As with the other Composite prime products these boards use a hidden-clip system for a sleek installation and a hollow construction, meaning it’s lightweight with greater heat absorption. If the deck is installed in the cold, hot weather will make the boards expand and go longer. Any gaps close and if they close too much the boards lift, warp and twist. If board are installed when warm, gaps increase in the cold making the deck look badly fitted. By having a board hollow, the amount of material that can expand is decreased.

This means the expansion and shrinkage of the hollow boards decrease making the board more stable over time and temperature variances. By reducing the material used in manufacture, will reduce cost and weight, but this is at a cost which is strength. Well solid boards are available and quite often offered as the premium or most expensive versions of a composite decking range.

Unlike stained timber boards, you can mix and match your colours without having to factor in the logistics of painting boards different colours every time they need treating. Aluminium composite decking panels which contain wooden starch and plastic . This material is well-established in practice as it looks stylish – it’s not easy to distinguish between composite and natural wood at first sight. This is due to the fact that the better part of the composite mixture (around 60 to 80%) is made of pieces of wood. The rest of it is reserved for compounds, such as polyethylene, UV-stabilisers, pigments and so on. Therefore, this type of material is also known as WPC – wood polymer composite.