Paint Dripping In Bathroom

[sleaver]

Brought some Damp Seal and Dulux Bathroom paint to decorate the bathroom!

Sanded down the old paint and filled in places with Pollycell Filler, waited for it to dry and sanded that down! Then applied the Damp Seal and waited over night for it to dry! The next day I did the first coat of Dulux and as it said on the tin waited 5 hours for that to dry! I them applied the second coat and finished around 6pm.

Then the problem started, on the wall that is an exteria wall, the paint started to run on the lower 2/3rd's of the wall and wouldn't dry! Could this be down to the cold conditions and the first coat possibly not being completely dry? The bathroom does get quite cold!

 

[keenbutconfused]

First off I am no expert but I tried to use the Dulux Kitchen and Bathroom paint and had real problems with it. I found that it was taking a long time to dry but was instead "setting" and anywhere I rollered over even as short a time later as 30 minutes I was "picking up " paint.

Perhaps on the external wall it is setting and then running in that state which explains why you didn't see it straight away.

I have been advised by Zampa, who seems to really know what he is talking about to but some Dulux Trade quick-drying eggshell which is the same stuff as the Kitchen and bathroom paint and use that instead. As I have a bathroom that does't get too steamy I am actually going to use Vinyl Matt.

Just out of interest what colour were you painting. My colour "damson dream 3" was quite a dark maroon colour and I dound that it simply wasn't covering the white underneath. Even on a sealed piece of mdf it took 4-5 coats to get it to the colour it was supposed to be. Sound familiar?

 

[Zampa]

Kitchen and bathrrom paint is like glue...your right about the exterior wall being cold and that sounds like whats causing the problem...you really need to put that stuff on very thin as it has a reputation for running and sagging,

You could wipe the wet stuff off and re coat it or...next time you use it stick an electric heater in the room AFTER you have painted.

 

[sleaver]

The colour was Blue Lagon and on the 2 walls that have dried it looks quite nice!

The first coat stuck so I cant really understand why the second didn't apart from the temperature and the first coat still being a bit wet!

We have got a wall heater (on the oposite wall) that dried the top half but going to try and get one we can put on the floor!

Its been suggested that we sand the sall to give the paint something to grip too and then re apply the paint. Does this sound right and if so would 1 coat be enough? Plus use a heater afterwards!

Also in the parts where it has dried so patches are darker then the rest, even compared to the alright walls, and get condensation ob them! Anyone know why this is?

 

[2scoops0406]

Difficult to say, but as has been pointed out, the non drying of the paint is probably caused by condensation forming on the exterior wall. Maybe the first two coats were applied on warmer days than the last coat, thus reducing the condensation. WRT to the darker patches, where condensation forms, this would perhaps suggest that the cavity (if there is one) in these areas has been breached, possibly by muck on the ties. (This admittedly is pure speculation however).

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Sleaver:

No, actually, this is a common problem to trip over in the cold cold Canadian winters.

In my humble estimation, you should lay the blame mostly at the color of the paint you chose.

YOU SEE:

Few paint companies now have any colored tint bases any more. Most paint companies will just use a "clear" or "Deep tint" base for all of their highly pigmented colors. That means you start with a tint base that would dry clear if you didn't tint it, and you just pour lots and lots and lots of colorant into that tint base to get it to the color you want. And, my guess would be that a color named "Lagoon Blue" would require an awful lot of of blue colorant to make a tint base that would normally dry clear, dry to a lagoon color.

Now, what's in all that colorant that's being added to your paint in the paint tinting machine?

Actually, it's glycerine. More correctly, glycerol, cuz it's an alcohol. But WHY glycerine? Well, it's cuz glycerine is equally soluble in both water and mineral spirits, so the same colorants can be used to tint both latex (which you call "emulsion") and oil based paints, and that's an advantage to hardware stores that will typically only have one paint tinting machine.

And, glycerine is much slower than water to evaporate. In fact, it will typically take about 30 days for the glycerine added when tinting a paint to fully evaporate from the paint after it's applied.

In your case, what you have is a paint chaulked full of glycerine sitting on a cold wall. If you put that paint on a warm wall it woulda taken 2 or 3 days to dry! Put it on a cold wall, and it might take a week or two.

If it were me, I'd just put in on in thinner coats and have both a fan and heater in the room to promote evaporation of the glycerine from the paint. Or, wait until summer to finish this job.

You can probably just clean the paint off the wall with a damp sponge and switch to a less heavily pigmented (pronounced "one with less colorant in it") colour, like an off white or pastel in the blue direction.

Hope this helps.

PS: You should also be aware that the ability of a paint to hide an underlying color is dependant on the type and amount of pigments in the paint. In general, the flatter the paint, the greater the volume ratio of pigment to clear plastic binder in the paint, and the better the paint hides. The converse is also true. The glossier the paint, the less well it will hide an underlying colour, but the easier it will be to clean with simple wiping. So, for better hide, go with a flatter paint.
The type of pigments in the paint is also an important consideration. You should also be aware that phthalocyanine blue (the most commonly used blue pigment) in paints doesn't have great hide. So, without any other pigments in that paint, it's not going to hide an underlying color very well.
So, I'm concerned that, depending on what gloss level you chose, you could have gotten yourself into a situation where you might need 7 coats of paint to hide the underlying color, and each coat of paint is gonna take 7 days to dry. Hmmm. sounds like a puzzle.

Here, do this: Open your phone book to "Industrial Coatings" and see if you see any places listed there that ALSO sell house paints. If so, go make friends with the salesman for the Industrial Coatings side of that company. When you buy paint, it's up to YOU to pick the chemistry (water, oil, alkyd, polyurethane, epoxy, etc.), it's up to you to pick the color and it's up to you to pick the gloss level. So, if you have any problems with the paint you bought, it's your own fault for not knowing that the chemistry, color or gloss you chose wasn't appropriate to your application. When you want to buy an industrial coating, then it's the salesman that looks at your application and recommends a chemistry, a color and a gloss level. To do that, he has to know about paint. And, he can advise you on your choice of paints for your house just as easily as he can advise a customer on what type of coating to put over a concrete factory floor. So, make friends with your local industrial coatings salesmen, and lots of what they know will rub off on you.

 

[gcol]

Looks like that Nestor chap is gonna be a handy man to have around.
Good post - very interesting.
Gcol

 

[2scoops0406]

Certainly an informative reply, good stuff, this is more of the kind of thing we need rather than petty arguments (mind you, I've no idea whether it's correct, but it sounds good!!). Who would have thought that paint is so complex.... Well I would but that's only 'cos I'm a very sad individual. Please keep posting sir.

 

[confidentincompetent]

Some colors in the dulux trade range have an (*) next to the number this denotes that it's a special process colour, in other words it needs at least three coats. I dont know why dulux omit this with retail paints but if you look on trade card you might see this asterisk *. Have found this with Zingy yellow, willow green etc. Pain innit.

 

[Zampa]

I always ask the people in my paint suppliers to mix me an undercoat or an eggshell using the same 'recipe' as the gloss...it can make the difference between 2/3/4 coats sometimes...unless its leyland paint..in which it can make the difference between 5/6/7 coats.

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Actually, Gentlemen, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Nestor Kelebay, and I post under my real name because I take pride in the information I provide being accurate and reliable. So, what little recognition there is in being a reliable source of information on the internet comes to me rather than a nickname or some other false ID.

I'm on a one man crusade to help dispell much of the misinformation and disinformation that's floating around about paint. Paint is the least understood technology in the whole hardware store. What other trade or technology can you point to where the sum total knowledge of people with years of experience in the field boils down to a single sentance: "The difference between water based and oil based paint is that you clean up water based paints with water and you clean up oil based paints with paint thinner."

The real problem is that paint companies don't actually make anything that they use to make their paints with. (Your ICI Ltd. is an exception because they do make their own acrylic resins for latex paint.) Most paint companies buy their binders from the chemical companies that make plastics (like DuPont, Akzo Nobel or Bayer (the Aspirin people)). They buy their pigments from companies that specialize in pigments (like Sun Chemical, DuPont or Bayer (the Aspirin people), and they buy their additives from chemical companies too. So, your local paint company makes paint in much the same way as your local housewife makes soup; by blending together ingredients purchased from various suppliers, diluting and serving in gallon size cans.

(just as an aside, DuPont is North America's largest manufacturer of the white pigment titanium dioxide. Since white primers and white or off-white paints are so commonly used, very much of what people need to know about paint and primers involves being knowledgable about titanium dioxide. DuPont markets it's line of titanium dioxide pigments under the brand name "Ti-Pure".

Bayer (the Aspirin people) are big into making both alkyd and polyurethane resins for paints, "varnishes" and hardwood floor finishes. They also market inorganic pigments with their line of Bayferrox pigments, and people in here will soon become familiar with the difference between organic and inorganic pigments.

Basically, the root of the problem is that the chemists that work for the paint companies do little more than quality control testing. It's the chemical companies that make the resins, pigments and additives that those paint companies buy that are the real experts on paint and making good quality paint. Unfortunately, the people working in paint stores and home centers deal only with the sales reps of the paint companies, and those people really know very little about paint, even the paint their company makes. And, so they have little knowledge to pass on to the people working behind the counteres. As a result, the entire field of paint has become one where most people rely on either brand loyalty or the worldly experience and advice of the 17 year old stocking the shelves in the home center (or working behind the counter) to make their paint purchasing decisions, and that's little better than using a Ouija board to decide such matters.

And, since your average paint store clerk relies on the assumption that you know even less about the paint you're buying than he does to maintain an aire of credibility, the entire area of paint is very much a situation of the blind leading the blind and everyone getting lost in the process.

And, there's no good reason for that situation to exist. Nothing about the subject is hard or difficult to understand. It just needs to be explained. That's where I come in.

But, it will be yourselves that decide whether this subject is hard and difficult or not as you learn it. I don't believe it is.

And, I intend to make that process as easy and as much fun as possible. What else would you expect from a Canadian?

Welcome to the internet revolution. When the printing press was invented, the resulting increase in printed material caused an explosion in knowledge amongst the peoples of Europe. When Gutenberg invented movable type, the resulting annotation of printed material helped sustain that explosion in knowledge. When the radio became common in North American households, that caused an explosion in knowledge of the outside world. People knew what was happening with the war in Europe on a day-by-day basis. Now, we have the internet, and dare we expect less of it than the printing press or the radio? I hope not.

Also, I should emphasize that I can subvert my own mission by building expectations up to unrealistically high levels. I don't want to do that. I want people in here to just read my posts with the same sense of skepticism that they read any other post with. And, if they find themselves learning anything from them, then count that as a blessing.

I don't want people expecting more than is reasonable or more than I can realistically deliver cuz I'm only a human being, as are we all. Just read my posts with an open mind and decide for yourself if they are worth reading, and expect no more than that. The lower your expectations, the better I'll look at the end of the day. The higher your expectations, the greater the liklihood that I'll be seen as a disappointment.

So, gentlemen, start your engines.

 

[joe-90]

I've got a question that I thought about just yesterday. When I apply paint stripper to a paint (Nitromorse) it removes the paint regardless of whether it is oil based or acrylic. Is this because it shares a common binder? Or just plain coincidence that one chemical removes all types of paint?


joe

 

[Zampa]

Im not sure about all the ins and outs of nitromors but i know its based on methylene chloride..when its applied to oil and water based paints it will react with the binder/medium of that paint.
It will strip water based paints but strips oil based better as it works by causing a chemical reaction...there are more chemicals to be had i guess in oil based paints.

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Jeo-90:

I honestly don't know what paint strippers do to break oil and emulsion paints apart. Zampa is correct that the traditional chemical used to strip paint is methylene chloride (which is a methane molecule with two of the four hydrogens replaced with chlorine atoms, so it's a very small molecule).

However, other paint strippers use a chemical called d-Limonene (which is produced naturally in the peels of citrus fruits, mostly oranges). So, if a stripper says "Citrus powered" on it, or something to that effect, the active chemical in it is d-limonene. D-limonene works not too bad on emulsion paints, but it's a waste of time on oil based paints.

You'll also find paint strippers that use something called "dimethyl adipate" as the active ingredient, and paint strippers that way they're gentle on the skin and allow water clean up will use dimethyl adipate as the active ingredient. (And, I'm actually surprised at how effective they are in removing paint for a chemical that doesn't irritate my skin at all like methylene chloride does.)

But, I don't know the chemical process by which any of these chemicals work to strip emulsion or oil based paints.

To answer your question, however, there is absolutely no similarity between the binders use in emulsion paints and those used in oil based paints. The pigments used in emulsion and oil based paints are the same, however.

Post again if you want to know the difference between the binders used in the various categories of emulsion paints and/or the difference between a drying oil, an alkyd resin and a polyurethane resin.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

 

[joe-90]

Here's an interesting fact about methylene chloride:

"When methylene chloride is used near an open flame, poisonous "phosgene" gas can be created. Phosgene can cause permanent lung damage at low levels."



Phosgene was a gas used in the trenches of WW1.

So if you've used Nitromorse on a piece of wood - don't go finishing off with your blowlamp!


joe