Low Maintenance Wood Windows
If wooden windows were as easy to maintain as UPVC many more people would choose them. The maintenance requirements can easily be as costly as the windows themselves, with a window costing £1000 likely to cost several times that over it’s natural life in maintenance. If you supply wooden windows, offering low maintenance wood windows to your customers will enhance your sales.
Joinery Shops Offering Low Maintenance Wood Windows
Now your customers can have the natural beauty of wood, without the full onerous maintenance requirements of wood. Used by sailors since 1972 this technology has kept varnish stuck to wood on boats. Can you achieve varnish finishes that last for 16 years, even without salt water? Was it the promise of low maintenance that allowed the UPVC manufacturers to lure your customers away?
Use MultiWoodPrime prior to finishing, and whether the top coat is Paint or Varnish, you will achieve low maintenance wood windows. The windows working life is further massively extended, as the vulnerable end grain is fully sealed. MultiWoodPrime allows the wood to breathe and costs little more than traditional primers, whilst offering much more.
If your customer has already decided to invest £10,000 in new windows You want the best for them. To protect your reputation, and ensure their recommendation, just prime with MultiWoodPrime before finishing. MultiWoodPrime acts as a sanding sealer and provides a stable base for paint or varnish that lasts. The wood has a microporous sealed surface, so it breathes normally, yet offers a stable base for paints or varnishes.
Consumers Want Low Maintenance Wood Windows
Looking to have new wooden windows fitted? Repainting windows is painfully expensive as you will be fully aware. Doubling the time between maintenance events drastically reduces the total cost of ownership of wooden windows. If your joinery shop does not offer you this service, we will be only too happy to introduce them to the process.
Low Maintenance Wood Window Costs
The following examples are from a real world order of 10 solid oak windows. They cost just under £10,000 glazed and furnished but supply only, not installed. They were a variety of sizes, from 600mm up to 2400mm. A single repainting event on these windows, on a two story house, will require scaffolding or access solutions. Probable cost is in excess of £1,000 due to the requirement to scaffold.
- MultiWoodPrime used: £175
- Labour to apply: £250
Total cost = £425, or under 5% of the purchase price. This is under 50% of the cost of a single maintenance event, and will repay itself many times over in the life of the windows.
The wooden window alliance commissioned some research, which is no longer published. It had some awful flaws misrepresenting the cost of the maintenance event. It aimed to investigate how big a difference extended maintenance intervals makes to ownership cost. The table from that research is reproduced here – and the clear benefits of increasing the maintenance interval can easily be seen. The flaws in that research, which uses a repainting cost of £20 / window, are glaring and obvious. In Kent you cannot get a window repainted for £20, and £200 would be more realistic.
If the Wooden Window Alliance reckon wood windows require repainting every 6 years, we believe Low Maintenance Wood Windows are ones that requires repainting every 20 years.