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Old 01-19-2021, 09:05 PM   #6
STB
Guru
 
City: Gulf coast
Join Date: Aug 2016
Posts: 2,271
I had a contractor use inject-a-deck on an area on my front deck. It has been about 1.5 years. It is still as good as it was the day they did the injections. I posted a thread here describing it. You can search for it.

The upshot is that I think it is a really good solution for a specific class of problem, specifically where the decks aren't bad enough to be worth replacing the core -- but also such that one doesn't want to wait around and let moisture get inside and stay inside to degenerate the decks to the point that they need replacement.

My sense is that the 12lb density polyurethane (foam) injections can fill small voids, displace tiny pockets of water, incorporate small amounts of moisture, and get a good bond to layers of wood that are in the very early stages of coming apart, all in all, denying water the chance to sit inside and rot and preserving things whole. In other words, it can preserve an improve decks that are just noticeably starting along the road.

But, I think one needs to read the words "small" and "tiny" there with a strong sense of reality. I view it as a way to stabilize decks in the early stages of a situation that would otherwise degenerate before they get "bad" much more than I do a magic wand to turn "mush" into something sound. I don't think the latter is easily possible.

In my case, the inject-a-deck solved a very specific problem which was that the PO had removed, glassed over, and painted the front deck, but didn't get it dried out enough 1st. There were some areas where the fiberglass layer didn't adhere well to the wood. The inject-a-deck got in and formed a thin layer between the wood and the glass and adhered the two together. There were also some specific small pockets in the wood where old deck bolts had left voids. In my specific case, it worked like a charm, tied things together, filled those small voids, and denied that space to water and thereby a future problem.

If I still had the boat in SoCal, where I could have gotten it really dried out, I'd probably just have used epoxy. But, in Florida, that seemed to me to be likely to have been repeating what the PO had done, and likely to get the same result. The polyurethane just works much better than epoxy in the presence of (small amounts of) moisture, both in theory and in my experience.
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