One of the first certified Liquid Ceramic® applicators in the Raleigh area, Dan Lamontagne, told me a story of the visit by three Sherwin Williams’ managers to a home in North Raleigh where the Liquid Ceramic® Coating was being applied. Dan was a long term user of Sherwin Williams’ products and was using the lifetime coating, Liquid Ceramic® for the first time.

After exchanging pleasantries the regional manager asked: “Dan, is this stuff any good?”

Dan replied that it was great. Easy to apply, coating looks great and for the money, a good buy for the homeowner.

“Well…” the manager replied “you know that we could have been making a lifetime product like that for years, but we’re in the business of selling paint.”

Duration®, their leading brand, is now being promoted as a “lifetime coating” even though two years ago in asking one of their paint retailers how long it would last, I got the response of five to seven years.

What changed? It wasn’t the formulation. From my perspective as an architect, it’s a bit of “market positioning” combined with some “smoke and mirrors.”

In reading the label on almost any can of exterior house paint, from the most expensive to surprisingly, the cheapest, you will find the words: “lifetime guarantee”. All you need to do is bring (all of) your paint cans back to the store with your sales receipt and the product will be replaced. When your factor in that most retailers now use thermographic receipt paper that fades in less than a year, and that almost no one keeps all of their old paint cans after a job is complete, you begin to understand that what the manufacturer is really doing is playing the percentages game. Combine that with knowing that the guarantee says nothing about the labor for the repaint, or for the repair of damaged materials resulted from the product failure and you can quickly determine the real value of that “lifetime guarantee.”

So, do any of the so-called “lifetime coating” really work or are they just a marketing strategy?

When my son and I, who are partners in an architectural practice were asked by my brother, Tom Alsop, president of Liquid Ceramic International, to give our opinion of the Canadian product marketing in the US as Liquid Ceramic®, we were skeptical about the claims.

How can you stop a 98 mph wind driven rain, yet still release moisture from the substrate? If water goes one way, then it will go the other…stands to reason, right?

Also, how can you claim to be three times harder than a hardwood floor, yet flexible enough to expand and contract indefinitely?

And then there was the claim that it lasts thirty years or longer, with some applications known to last over forty years.

I saw “liability suit” written all over this one. Tom asked us to simply take an objective look at the data and tell him what we found out.

Shortly after that, my son Ritch headed to graduate school at Harvard and I was left with the unfortunate task of telling Tom the bad news. Or at least I was assuming it would be bad.

A bit of homework later…

Some minor investigation showed that a number of companies claiming to have a lifetime product had come and gone. Many as the result of placing “elastomeric” coatings on homes. Elastomerics will last a lifetime. Unfortunately, because they don’t breathe, moisture is not able to be released from below the surface of the coating and the substrate, the walls and the structure, literally dissolve. I observed this condition on wood products and surprisingly, stucco. What was more disturbing was learning that after extensive failures, these companies closed down and the principals established businesses under different names and continued selling the same poorly formulated products.

The recent closure of Alvis® Spray-on-Siding, a vigorously promoted “lifetime” coating has spun off several companies with “reformulated” products with the same claims. At the time of its close, Alvis® was involved in a number of lawsuits and BBB filings resulting from product failure and failure of the company to correct damage attributed to the product.

With suspicions heightened, I honed in on the manufacturer of the Liquid Ceramic® product, a Canadian company near Vancouver BC

I got my best information from outside the company from a man named Lloyd Lucas, Principal of Emerald Inspection and Consulting Services in Coquitlam, BC. He was involved in investigating and approving the coating for applications in Canada a number of years ago for a company that wanted some strong verification that the product would perform as advertised. 

He shared with me what he had learned about the history of the product. It was developed in the early 60’s by a chemist by the name of Fred Benz. His company marketed the product for about twenty years under the name Ply Cap. At age 80 or so, he sold to a group of Germans who marketed it as Tuff Coat. In the 90’s the current owners bought the company and market the same product under the name Ceramic Insulcoat by Envirocoatings, Inc. 

He relayed that the coating was used on a large number of high rises, wooden homes and other buildings throughout Canada and described it, in the conservative language of an engineer, as a “good formulation”.

The engineered formulation…

According to Mr. Lucas, the approach that Dr. Benz took was to research the characteristics of a good coating and then engineer the formula to achieve specific performance characteristics. Most companies start with determining what the price at the point of sale needs to be and then work backwards to determine how much money is left for the ingredients, which is often less than the cost of packaging and shipping.

I then took a look at the standards published by Envirocoatings to learn how the product performed and to explain what appeared to be contradictory claims.

Many of the standards that I was provided were from familiar testing services. For several decades of my career, I evaluated materials for nuclear power plants and later laboratories for medical, environmental and manufacturing industries. All of these require a significant amount of research and compliance with testing services.

The investigation into the claims proved most enlightening. A 98 MPH wind driven rain will go through a single coat of Liquid Ceramic® in 30 minutes. Put on two coats and you slow it down to over 24 hours. The answer to how it works is that it has hydroscopic properties, slowing the migration of water under pressure until it stops. The product testing shows a perm rating of 20. When combined with an application that has a dry film thickness of from 10-12 mm, about the thickness of a phone book cover, you have one of the best performing products in the industry. Now that made sense! (It was interesting when I ran the calcs for regular exterior paint. Using published information, you learn that one coat of most paints dry to ½ the thickness of one page in the yellow pages…you don’t have to be an engineer to know that this won’t last a lifetime!)

The hardness was the difference between an impact test, and the level of elasticity engineered into the coating. Most coatings are elastic for a period of time. Paint for a year or two, other coatings longer. Ceramic microspheres and titanium dioxide were responsible in large part for these characteristics. Most paints are formulated with calcium carbonate (chalk) to get the thick appearance, although chalk doesn’t increase performance, as far as I could determine. Most people conclude that a paint is fading when often it is that fact that as soon as the surface sheen is oxidized under a year or so of sunlight, the paint will start to “chalk” and then degrade under sun, wind and rain. And then there is the issue of how much mold and mildew thrive on a damp chalky base. A topic for another day.

What I learned was that it was the combination of the “perm rating” and it’s “elastic properties”, working together in a well balanced engineered formulation that allows the product to last the thirty of more years. And from all evidence, it will last at least that long…and counting.

I then asked how I knew that it was the same formula year after year and not cheapened each time raw material and energy costs go up.

The answer is ISO 9001. As the president of a company that was one of the first ten A/E’s in the US to earn an ISO certification, I can attest to the rigors of the certification process and to the fact that the independent auditors, approved by ANSI, are extremely conscientious in their annual inspections. If you are not doing what you claim, the certification comes off.

Most paint companies do not subscribe to this rigorous manufacturing standard because it restricts them from accepting a boxcar load of a substitute material offered at a discount price because it may be just a tad “off-spec.”

The logical conclusion…

With facts in hand, I felt that I had one clear option. I approached my brother and made an offer to purchase territories for the exclusive right to market Liquid Ceramic.® Since then I have spent a lot of time to ensure that the applicators are trained (a story for another day) and spent time with homeowners. Knowing how important maintenance of their home is to their future, I feel that my professional goals are more than being met. 

I have been part of a few signature projects over my career, but being there for families with a product that will make their home last longer and cost less to maintain is certainly equally rewarding.