Through colour render or paint

[andyrew1]

Replacing our pebbledash with lime based render one of the guys who came to quote proposed a through coloured top coat. I knew it existed for modern renders but hadn't thought of this before for ours.

I can see the advantages in much less maintenance and one less step in the process. But the down side I see is if you have to patch something around a new hole for a pipe or something or you chip a corner off it will be far more difficult/impossible to make a tidy job of it than if it was painted.

Are there any other advantages/disadvantages I should be weighing up?

It was a PRB system he was proposing but I see a few others also have coloured top coat options.

 

[stuart45]

Through colour renders are popular nowadays, although they can stain over the years. You only have to look at the number of K rend cleaning companies around.
Repair patches normally stand out.

 

[paulc]

I have mixed pigments in to lime plaster before now, and so have others going back to Roman times. So coloured plasters/renders have been around for a very long time. However, you will get slight variations in colour between batches when you mix your own - Be very precise in measuring quantities when mixing a batch, and the variation shouldn't stand out. A couple of coats of matching lime wash should take care of things if the batches are too far off.

 

[LadyArowana]

I’m sure Nigel Watts had his house lime rendered with one coloured with copperas? or some other product. Will see if the thread is on here.

 

[LadyArowana]

Found one of the threads about it, if you put ‘copperas’ into the search function a bunch of references show up https://www.periodproperty.co.uk/forum/threads/ave-copperas.12654/#post-170957

 

[Zebra]

I have a through coloured render. It's good. The supplier gave me a bag of the pigment so I could patch in any repairs. I did end up giving the whole thing a coat of limewash after ten years though because it was starting to look a bit grubby. That was being quite fussy though, it didn't really need it. I would say it hasn't needed as much maintenance as limewash on its own would need outdoors. There are other external walls which didn't have the through coloured render, they just had a putty based render and limewash from the start. Those I've relimewashed every 3 years I would say, with the same pigment as the through coloured render and got a good match.