Paint mixing cost?

I need 2.5l of an obsolete Duluk silk emulsion. I can find plenty of mixing services, but no prices. Anyone got a price?
Thanks

Not sure what you mean by mixing services.

Most decorators' merchants can scan a colour (eg your old paint on a bit of lining paper) but all they will do is find the nearest match in the scanner's paint library. Eg. Take a Dulux sample to a store that only sells Leyland, they will find the nearest in the Leyland range.

A while ago I popped into a store that had mixed a Dulux colour for a customer some years earlier. I discovered that Dulux had discontinued the colour . The store scanned the colour and found the next nearest colour in the current Dulux range. It was very different. I ended up having to repaint the whole room.

If however you mean that you purchased a pre-mixed tin of Dulux retail paint from the likes of B&Q and that B&Q no longer sell that colour, it may still be the case that it still exists in the dulux library. Phone your local decorators' merchant that sells Dulux Trade paints and ask them (do not waste your time going to a DIY shed).

Good luck.

Dulux archive many of their old colours. Go to a builder's merchant with a Dulux paint mixing setup (Travis Perkins do Dulux) and see if they can mix it for you. If you're lucky, they might be able to do it from a code number on the tin

geraldthehamster said:

Dulux archive many of their old colours.

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Believe it or not, from time to time Dulux discontinue colours, which seems odd given that it must be possible for them to reproduce those colours even though the pigments and bases may have deviated slightly.

Paint colours are an odd area. Late last year my customer paid £180ish for 20L of DT matt emulsion so that I could repaint her hallway. She purchased the same colour/code/brand that had been used 5 years earlier. The colour was completely different.

I rang Dulux, and then sent them the two colur samles painted side by side on a bit of lining paper. To be fair to them they explained that colours sometimes drift away from the correct colour (normally as result of them changing the base paints and the core mixants) . Periodically they take a sample of colour X and compare it to their original sample of X and then tweak the pigment ratio accordingly. They were unable to confirm if the old tin or the new one had deviated from the correct colour

They sent my customer vouchers for another 20L. She got the Dulux Decorator Centre to scan the paint and find the paint that was closest to the Dulux paint that she had previously used. The colour selected by the machine was far closer than the new one. Neither were the same but that wasn't too much of a problem given that I was repainting all of the surfaces.

Very interesting. If odd that they claim to be able to remix but can't. Given you can get ant given BS/Ral paint code from a random manufacturer of choice and typically it's there or there about identical such that two ajoining panels look ok, if not good enough to patch one with the other.

dhutch said:

Very interesting. If odd that they claim to be able to remix but can't. Given you can get ant given BS/Ral paint code from a random manufacturer of choice and typically it's there or there about identical such that two ajoining panels look ok, if not good enough to patch one with the other.

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Valid questions/points.

I have no idea how many of the paints in the Dulux range are copyrighted or how many are British Standard or RAL compliant?

The fact they admitted that colours sometimes drift away from the original also makes me wonder how often that happens with other brands.

Who knows. Just seems really odd. I mean a RAL or BS paint colour doesn't drift with time!

But if guess it's a different market, and it's basically not a problem for them. So they tweak the base and pigments with time to make improvements one way or the other, and people buy the paint based on the swatch cards and almost never buy the same colour again.

opps said:

She purchased the same colour/code/brand that had been used 5 years earlier. The colour was completely different.

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Could the paint on the walls have changed colour over the five years ?

bernardgreen said:

Could the paint on the walls have changed colour over the five years ?

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Nah, it was very different on both occasions .

With the first job, the client had about 0.25L left. I used that, it was fine for touching up but there wasn't enough. WhenI went to my local decorators' merchant I discovered that the paint had been discontinued.

In the second case, again the client had paint left over. That too was fine for touching up but when mixed on the Dulux machine, the colour was very different.

I am now reminded of another case- my mum's house. Again she had paint left over but not enough. The shop mixed more of what should have been the same colour. Again it was very different. The shop suspected that the deviance might be the result of Dulux having recently tweak the pastel base. They found some old stock of the base and mixed the paint with that. It worked. The downside is that when she runs out of touch up paint, she will have to find a new colour and repaint all of the walls.