Product of the month: Resene Wintergrade Additive

07 Jun 2023

Painting in winter can be a challenge with the cold weather playing havoc with application and performance of standard paints. With a little Resene Wintergrade Additive you can winterise your paint and keep painting through winter.

Waterborne paints are typically based on tiny, thermoplastic particles that deform and stick to one another during the stresses of drying and film formation. Particles deliberately engineered to be soft, form films easily even at quite low temperatures. The softness, however, extends to the finished film, making it prone to damage from dirt retention. Hard particles can be made, but they require heat, or large amounts of plasticising solvents, in order to form films.

A paint film dried in the cold can crack and even just dry to a powder. This is because the acrylic base needs some warmth to make the particles soft enough to stick together. There’s an intermediate set of temperatures between 5°C to 10°C where the film appears normal but looks can be deceptive as the coating is likely to have much poorer than normal durability. The surface temperature of the substrate may be considerably colder than the ambient air temperature, which creates even more of a challenge for normal paints.

The Resene Technical team first developed a small range of winterised products that will dry in temperatures down to 3°C, which have been used in winter conditions for over 10 years.

To make it even easier to choose a wintergrade finish in a wider range of colours and products, Resene created Resene Wintergrade Additive, which you can add to a range of selected waterborne Resene paints to winterise them.

Simply check the weather conditions for the day of painting and add Resene Wintergrade Additive to the paint you plan to apply if cold weather is predicted. Winterised products can be applied in temperatures as low as 3°C. Once the temperature reaches over 10°C, you can use the standard Resene finish without the Resene Wintergrade Additive.  No need to buy two separate pails of paint to deal with changes in temperature.

Main picture: Ground Training Wing at Base Woodbourne, finished in Resene Summit Roof Wintergrade.

Published: 07 Jun 2023