There doesn't seem to be an indepth review of X TEX on the net already - its a very handy product so I thought I would add my experience as this page comes top of the search results for X TEX.
I bought the X TEX from Toolstation - about £23. You will also need a sharp scraper - I bought the one from Tool station but it was rubbish so I bought the one from
Screwfix which was really good (see photo).
You will also need protective glasses, a proper dust mask, a large paint brush, rubbish bags and lots of sheeting.
My particular situation was that I had a room with artex ceiling with asbestos in it. The whole ceiling had to come down anyway including plasterboard - my house was already a mess anyway so it doesn't matter if I got crap on the carpet.
Obviously my main concern was preventing absbestos fibres being released into the room.
Some things I will say
- this can be hard manual labour and doing multiple rooms would be a big effort
- it WILL make your room dirty bigtime
- it is very difficult to scrape the artex off without damaging the plasterboard behind
I had to weigh up the cost of profressional asbestos removal (hundreds) vs doing it myself so I chose to do it myself.
So the X TEX stuff is a blue mixture - its like crushed blue ice (like a slush puppy almost).
You need to paint it onto the ceiling - it does fall off so you need to be careful - just work it into the gaps - the deep artex bits will hold the right amount in.
My artex ceiling had been up many years (over 25 at least) and had been painted a few times.
Work methodically going over every section - although the X TEX does stand out as you paint it it starts to fade and becomes translucent so it is not always crystal clear what areas you have done.
You then leave it to dry. In my case I did the room in 2 sections. The first section I left for about 3 hours and the next section I left over night (I then had to come back and spray it with water to re-activate it and left it another 30-45 minutes).
So the first time after 3 hours I came back and started scraping it - it takes some getting used to but you basically want it to come off like stripped wallpaper. Initally I was digging in too deep and cutting past the artex into the plasterboard - this meant dust was coming down which was worrying (given the asbestos) but after some practice I managed to avoid digging in too deep. If the X TEX has gone deep enough you will be able to scrape it away like wallpaper leaving the plasterboard behind.
After some messing around I was reasonably confident the dust was from the plasterboard and not the artex - the artex becomes like a wet gloopy thing - bag it up as you go as it gets messy (and have dust sheets down).
You will find that sometimes if a bit comes off you can carefully pull it - pulling off large amounts of artex at the same time - avoid scraping off little bits at a time.
You may have seen the X TEX promotional video - in my case it did kind of work like that - but not all the way through.
The second time I did it I painted the X TEX on, left it overnight and then sprayed water on it to reactivate. This time I was smarter and just took the entire plasterboard off from the ceiling and did almost no scraping (on at the edges to tidy up) - again just make sure the artex has gone soft by giving it a scrape first.
The second time was much easier - scraping was difficult but pulling off entire boards was much easier.
The photos show one half already done and one half with X TEX on it read to be done - you can see how I have damaged the old plasterboard by scraping in to it.
Overall my view is that it says what it does on the tin - it is expensive - it is messy - it can be hard work physically (esp if doing multiple rooms or scraping it all off) - it has saved me time in getting professional abestos removers in.
Even if you scrape it off methodically you might find it difficult to get clean edges.
One small size pot (I believe 2.5kg) did a room roughly 3mx3m - maybe a little smaller The tin says it can do 3 square metres and I have a little left over. My layers that I painted on were not particularly thick - just brush it over a coupe of times and the ceiling just took what it could as the ridges in the X TEX will hold more in the deeper bits.
I should also add there are large parts of ceiling that were not damaged like shown in the photo.
