Boral Siding Review and Impressions
Chris Urba
In June of 2016 Boral launched their 5" Bevel siding. This is the technical name for what most of us in the northeast would consider a classic siding.
This is a pool house that we built in 2016 and sided with boral siding. This photo shows the unpainted product.
So far we have used this siding on two projects and everyone including the customer has been happy with it.
From an installation perspective, it is easier to work with than Hardie Board. The boards aren't as heavy and the material cuts just like wood. The boards also come in 16ft. lengths. These definitely become tricky to move around without breaking. We had good luck sliding them around the jobsite and then lifting them with two people. The Hardie Board comes in 12ft. lengths. We find that the extra 4ft. of length reduces the number of but seams dramatically. Another feature we enjoyed is the lack of expansion and contraction in the material itself. We use siliconized paintable caulk in the seams and after revisiting the job site 6 months later, the seams have not cracked.
Boral makes the siding, and the dimensional stock.(ie: 1x4, 1x6. 5/4x6, 2x4, etc) Another company then takes their stock and mills it into a selection of mouldings, bead board, crown, drip cap etc. So if you're buying any moulded materials it's not being done by Boral but a 3rd party. We had a few issues with the crown we ordered having chatter marks. The selection is also fairly limited. The bead board was fantastic, the drip cap wasn't great to work with and we found a piece of the bevel siding on it's side worked better. We also found that the material routs beautifully. The distributer didn't offer a cove mould so we set up the router table and it was like the router didn't even have to work, the material just glided through.
On the pool-house, pictured above, the customer was dead set against using a man made product. The house is on the historical registry and the customer wanted cedar siding. The husband was all for a lower maintenance material, however, and the woodpeckers had, over the years, made lots of holes in their house and garage. I took it upon myself to try to convince this customer to use the Boral product. I brought an 8ft. piece of the Boral siding and a piece of cedar siding to the house to show them side by side. I then painted both of the products and cut them into 2 ft. lengths so there were a total of 8 pieces. I then mixed them up and asked the customer to pick out the cedar siding. She stared for a minute, touched them and then gave up.
We then priced out the cedar siding with all cedar trim vs. the Boral and found the Boral to be cheaper by about 40% YMMV. This is obviously highly dependant on the availability and clarity of the cedar used but it was a fair comparison in the case of clear cedar vs. Boral.
We then sent the customer to see a Hardie project we had done and compare it to the Boral sample we sent along with them. They claimed to hate the Hardie board look saying it looked fake and the texture was all wrong.
Obviously the durability of Boral hasn't been truly tested by time. Even though the siding has been out for only a year, we have been using their trim products which have been around much longer.
The siding itself is composed of fly ash and is 70% recycled material. It has a unique feel to it and it almost seems to repel water. When we first started using Boral trim we had a scrap piece that wound up lying off in the weeds behind our garage. I've left it there for a few years to see what would happen and it doesn't seem to have absorbed any water or gotten soft.
A lot of the distributers in the area use displays for the Hardie board or Miratec products where they leave a piece submerged in a container of water to display it's water resistive properties. I take issue with this demonstration, however, because it doesn't subject the material to the dry wet cycle of a real installation.
We recently did a repair at a house where the gutter was leaking water and it was getting behind the hardie board siding. When we stripped the siding it was completely soft and rotted. it basically just disintegrated in our hands. So I don't care what happens with the material in a cup of water. I've seen what happens with a steady drip.