Where do you buy your composite decking?

[robinbanks]

The most reasonable price I've found for it is about £26 a square metre - does anyone know of suppliers that can better this?

Thanks!

 

[morqthana]

Hmm.

B&Q, who to be fair are not the destination of choice to find the best products at price-no-object, nor to find someone who can compete price-wise with sellers knocking out decking made from the finest composite chinesium on ebay, but who do, mostly, sell OK stuff at OK prices, want £65 per sq.m. for hollow boards.

Where did you find it at £26, and what was it? How was it for sagging, scuff-resistance, mould growth, colour-fading, ?

 

[robinbanks]

It was a clearance offer from UltraDecking, not sure if the price will have changed now.

In the end I picked up a hundred Hyperion branded (Envirobuild) boards for just under 22 quid a metre off Facebook marketplace but I've yet to fit them so no comments on the longevity aspects yet. I'm planning on sawing up a few of the boards into I beam shaped battens and screwing the boards to them to create a floating floor, as it has to go on top of a rubber covered deck that I don't want pierced. I this get to choose the support spacing and think it should be at most 300mm to reduce sag. I'll probably do 200

They look broadly identical to every other sample I saw, including those from Chinese sellers - I looked at importing direct from manufacturer too; the product is cheap but the shipping costs roughly double its price and probably account for why one can't find it much less than £26 a sq metre new - it's available at about £12 a metre in China, but shipping it also costs £12 and the 2 quid extra start is the local added profit - all the way up to whatever insane ask for "premium" boards that have circular holes through rather than square.. It perhaps all comes out of one or two Chinese factories and is variably branded and priced here

One thing that always irks me with products that imitate natural; there seems to be incredibly low variation in the print pattern. All these boards have an identical wood grain effect that repeats every 2 metres. Makes me want to lay the grooved side just so they're supposed to look the same rather than have some woodgrain
pattern that ends up looking naff because it obviously repeats. I mean, seriously, how much would it cost to have a 20 different impression rollers instead of just one. Same for printed tiles. Bah

 

[morqthana]

all the way up to whatever insane ask for "premium" boards that have circular holes through rather than square..

Or even solid boards.

One thing that always irks me with products that imitate natural; there seems to be incredibly low variation in the print pattern. All these boards have an identical wood grain effect that repeats every 2 metres. Makes me want to lay the grooved side just so they're supposed to look the same

You'd end up regretting that.

rather than have some woodgrain
pattern that ends up looking naff because it obviously repeats. I mean, seriously, how much would it cost to have a 20 different impression rollers instead of just one. Same for printed tiles. Bah

I've never understood the desire to fake the appearance of composite products. Particularly if the colour is so obviously not the colour that any real wood could ever be.

 

[robinbanks]

Or even solid boards.

Yeah, not sure I would have wanted to tow a hundred of those boards on a tipping trailer!

Ah, now there I don't mind the colour thing so much. It's obvious to me that it's fake when looking at the colour (but not to others judging by the comments I've received on my polyflor expona dark recycled wood LVT) but being able to see where every plank clones another one really makes me sad, like the manufacturer went to all the trouble of Setting up a production plant to knock out millions of boards and then couldn't be arst to take just a tiny bit more effort and introduce some huge improvement to the variation ..

 

[morqthana]

I wonder...

Did they set up this production plant in China, by any chance?