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Shieldcoat MD (Mark Slater) Guest Speaker at Surface Coatings Association of Australia Meeting

Recently at a technical meeting of the Queensland branch of the SCAA Shieldcoat MD Mark Slater gave the discourse “Acrylic Coatings Versus Cementitious Coatings” to its members. In his presentation he outlined that while cement renders were common today this was due largely to a price rather than technical advantage over acrylics. Negating this is the declining numbers of skilled applicators of cement renders. He talked about other cementitious setbacks including colour fading due to oxides forming and the difficulty of mixing colours on-site where dispersion of powders presents an environmental and health hazard.

Mr Slater contrasted this with some of the advantages of using acrylic render and texture systems. Not only do pre-mixed colours provide a labour-saving benefit but also fade less than similar cement based systems. He noted that further advantages acrylic systems offer is that they can be applied by general applicators and are more crack resistant than cement based systems.
One exciting feature of acrylic systems is that due to their nature they can also be formulated to substantially reduce heat ingress into substrates and interiors through their chemical makeup.

He finished by noting that while the use of cement based renders may continue, the trend in coating systems towards flexibility, in this comparison, is an advantage offered only by acrylic systems.