Ask the Expert Question-and-Answer Archive

by Ron Joseph

September, 2003

Selecting High Quality House Paint

Q. We are restoring a historical home in Naples Florida and my paint guy wants to use Duron paint. How do you feel that holds up under these weather conditions?

A. Thanks for your email, but I don't know about the performance if individual paints. The only source of which I am aware, that compares the quality of house pants is Consumer Reports. They look at the hiding power of the pigment, scrubbability and washability, exterior exposure and other properties. Other laboratories are capable of performing similar tests, but I am not aware that they publish their results to the public. You can access Consumer Reports at www.consumerreports.com and search for "paints". You will find several articles on this topic, but you will need to subscribe before you can have access to the reports.

In general I can tell you that the quality of paint depends in large part on how much you pay. The more expensive the paint, the more likely it contains higher quality ingredients. The less you pay, the less you get in terms of quality. Since paints are highly competitive consumer products, you can assume that competing vendors make a very small profit on their products. Bearing that in mind, you can assume that higher priced paints from competing vendors will have similar quality levels.