Painting in cold weather

[mrgas]

What is the pros advice on painting in close to freezing weather on outside masonry and outside woodwork?
Is it best avoided until warmer?
No rain forecast but temp hovering around freezing

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Neither job will be much fun in cold weather and both will have lots of moisture in the surfaces, so best to wait.

 

[sparkwright]

Pointless even trying, the moisture trapped in the surfaces will cause the new paint to fail very quickly.

Wait till the Spring when it starts to dry out properly.

 

[opps]

Under sufferance, I have painted a few houses over winter. The last two houses each took about 9 weeks each. On the days where there was ice on the scaffold boards I was pretty much limited to burning off paint. Epoxy resins that would cure in 4 hours during the summer took up to 3 days before I could sand them. I was using oil based paints. You aren't supposed to use them below 5 degrees. I went below that but only when the sun was shining on the surface. Waterbased masonry paints I only used (again in the sun) if the forecast was not due to fall below 5 degrees for the next 10 or so hours.

I was lucky that neither house had serious wet rot. I chopped out any wet bits and left them to dry for days before treating them.

Because of the lack of sunlight, I was averaging about 6 hours a day and lost days because of rain. I would advise against exterior painting over winter but it is doable.

 

[lostinthelight]

In Oct 2019 I contacted Santex tech support to ask if it was ok to paint fine build as the temperature was above that they recommend not to go below, the answer was definately not. I asked why not and she said it wasnt so much the temperature but the amount of humidity in the atmosphere slowing the drying proccess.