Four steps to maintaining your wooden cladding

The appearance of wooden cladding  changes naturally over time. However, its ageing can be premature due to climatic factors (sun, water), biological agents (fungus spores) or an existing finish that is deteriorating. It is therefore essential to maintain your wooden cladding  regularly to avoid having to replace it completely.

Why does wooden cladding  get damaged?

The factors responsible for the ageing of cladding are linked to its environment:

• The sun will inevitably alter the colour of wooden cladding , rarely evenly, as a result of the effect of ultraviolet rays on one of the wood’s main components, lignin. This is the phenomenon of greying.
• Water is also a source of premature ageing, as it will cause the wood to swell and form micro-cracks as it shrinks during drying, encouraging water to seep into the cladding. A high water content will also contribute to the development of spores and fungi on its surface.

All these climatic aggressions will eventually degrade and alter theeffectiveness of the film-forming products in the finish, which will become thinner and thinner, cracking and chalking.

What are the 4 steps to maintaining your wooden cladding ?

For optimum results , the best time best time to maintain your cladding is in spring.

1/ Carry out a diagnosis

The first thing to do is to carry out a diagnosis to assess the condition of the wood surface of the cladding and its finish, and to determine the type of wood. The diagnosis also makes it possible to determine the type of design of the façade (more or less draining design) as well as to identify the singular points where vigilance must be increased at the time of renovation.

By taking all these factors into account, you can select the most suitable maintenance solution for the cladding in question.

2/ Preparing and treating surfaces

If your exterior façade is greying or has stains of unknown origin, you will need to apply a woodstain remover to restore the wood’s shine. If the cladding becomes tarnished, floury or peeling, preparation involves completestripping by airbrushing which involves projecting a natural abrasive using low-pressure compressed air.

In all cases, it is essential to use PPE when preparing and then treating wooden cladding .

3/ Treating surfaces

To treat the cladding, apply an insecticide and fungicidesolution  directly to the cleaned wood. Applying a wood preservative helps toensure the longevity of the wood by protecting it from wood-eating insects, termites, spores and other fungi. The treatment makes the wood suitable for use in use class 3.1.

4/ Applying a finish

The finish will protect the cladding and give it an aesthetic appearance that meets your customers’ requirements. A saturator can be applied to cladding. With its matt, non-film-forming appearance, this finish saturates the wood to protect it from external aggression and delays greying. Another possibility for a finish, this time film-forming: an opaque stain or paint that protects the wood from weathering in the same way.

Why is choosing a professional product so important?

Choosing quality products is essential for a clean, long-lasting job. The XILIX range® EXPERT range offers high-performance products for all stages of wooden cladding  maintenance, from surface preparation to finishing.

Standardised accelerated and natural ageing tests carried out in accordance with European standard EN 927-6have shown that the products in the XILIX® EXPERT range have a durability* of between 3 and 5 years for the lightest shades and over 6 years for the darkest.

*as long as application is carried out according to the rules of the trade and under normal outdoor exposure conditions.