Dulux PaintPod Roller System

...thoughtful husband suggested that a Dulux PaintPod roller system would make lighter of these tasks for me. The TV advertisements certainly made it seem this way and so we set off intent on making our purchase.

We bought our system in Homebase for £69.99, although I think it is possible to get them a little bit cheaper elsewhere. The paint that needs to be used with the pod comes in a specially shaped plastic container. I understand ...
...choose from, but a far smaller number were stocked in my local branch of Homebase. The pods cost £29.99 for 5 litres, which is in line with a normal pot of paint, but unfortunately it is not possible to buy smaller packs of paint and 5 litres really is quite a lot.

In any case, we could only find paint packs in the colours we wanted for the dining room and living room, however as these were fairly big spaces we decided that it would ... more

At the end of last month I moved into my new house in Hertfordshire. As I am taking a few months out of the workforce, I am overseeing the ginormous amount of work that needs to be done and am personally handling the painting of just about every room in the house. With this in mind, my thoughtful husband suggested that a Dulux PaintPod roller system would make lighter of these tasks for me. The TV advertisements certainly made it seem this way and so we set off intent on making our purchase.

We bought our system in Homebase for £69.99, although I think it is possible to get them a little bit cheaper elsewhere. The paint that needs to be used with the pod comes in a specially shaped plastic container. I understand from the internet that there are about 35 colours to choose from, but a far smaller number were stocked in my local branch of Homebase. The pods cost £29.99 for 5 litres, which is in line with a normal pot of paint, but unfortunately it is not possible to buy smaller packs of paint and 5 litres really is quite a lot.

In any case, we could only find paint packs in the colours we wanted for the dining room and living room, however as these were fairly big spaces we decided that it would still be worth buying the roller system. I also think we just wanted to give it a go. For the rest of the rooms we bought normal tins of paint, normal brushes and paint rollers and I tackled these rooms first, finishing up on Sunday. Yesterday it was time to get to work with the paint pod system.

Set up

A bug bear of mine is why companies always use so much unnecessary packaging so as I unpacked my paint pod, I was on the look out for this and didn't think it was too bad. There were thankfully not that many parts to put together, although the instructions did seem to have rather a lot of labelled parts which I found a bit daunting. I concluded that putting together this system was not going to be intuitive but rather would require careful following of the instructions and that was my approach.

To my surprise, the instructions were easy to follow and went something like: plug in, drop an opened paint pack in one chamber a particular way around, insert dip tube into paint and click into place, attach spout or roller to the handle (which is attached to the dip tube by a long thin plastic tube) and off you go. I planned to do all my corners and edges first, so attached the spout so I could extract some paint into a small provided tray. I selected the "paint" button on the pod itself, pressed the trigger on the handle but other than a very loud whirring nothing happened. I puzzled over this for some time, checked I had done everything as per the instructions but still could not get any paint out of the pod. In the end I had to call the Helpline that I found on the instructions.

I managed to get through to a person reasonably quickly after working my way through the usual half dozen automated options. I prepared myself for the usual patronising "have you plugged it in love" kind of trouble shooting but fortunately and perhaps because a female took my call, I was spared. A few minutes earlier, my husband wisely told me that I should just read the instructions but I won't digress. On the call, I was asked a few questions about my set up and all seemed in order, she then asked me to take out the dip tube, locate some cogs at the top, find the cogs in the pod itself and then reinsert ensuring the cogs were lined up properly. It did the trick. It surprised me that it was possible to insert the dip tube and click it into place without these cogs being lined up and also that the instructions did not refer to the cogs (that I had not even noticed) or this crucial step at all.

Using the system

Extracting the paint into my tray for the edges was uneventful and after I had finished painting these, I took off the spout and attached the roller. I thought that neither clicked into place as easily as they should have and also taking them off again was not as smooth as I would have expected and it always felt like something was going to snap. Opening up the chambers where the paint goes and where the roller is stored also felt awkward and I was worried about breaking these too.

With my roller attached, I set to work on the walls. The instructions mention that the trigger should only be pressed intermittently, however there was no guideline as to what this actually means. One person's intermittent is surely different to another's. Clearly mine is very different to the person who wrote these instructions, I held the trigger for about ten or at most fifteen seconds and at first this did not seem to be doing any harm, but before I knew it, there was paint everywhere! It wasn't just that there was too much paint on the roller, it was leaking from where the tube attached to the handle, it was leaking through the trigger button and it even seemed to be leaking between the join in the plastic of the handle. The palm of my hand was covered in paint and I had to stop everything to clean up and even mop the floor as my dustsheet was only covering the half I was working on.

When I re-started I took great care not to press the trigger for more than a couple of seconds at a time, but there seemed no happy medium as then I didn't seem to have enough paint on the roller and it didn't completely stop the problems anyway. It would still drip frequently and I was constantly wiping up splodges, when I finished the palms of my hands and my clothes were absolutely covered in paint.

On a positive note it was quick. When I had been doing the other rooms, I was up and down a ladder and constantly refilling up the roller, whereas with this system I could just keep going. I don't think it took much more than an hour to do one coat of the whole room. The coverage was not great though, I was painting a pale peach over a pale mint green but presumably as I was being so careful not to overload the roller, I ended up with weird peachy-mint green walls. After a short break, I did a second coat, which I would have been doing anyway and the walls became the colour they were supposed to be.

The system has a self-cleaning feature and if you are taking a break for more than four hours it should be cleaned to avoid paint drying and clogging it up. I did not have a break for this long so just did the cleaning at the end. I found it very straightforward; the roller brush has its own place inside the unit so it can be cleaned at the same time. The first step is to drain the paint out of the tube and this is done in ten seconds at the press of a button. Next you take the dip stick out of the paint, manually wipe it clean, remove the paint pack, fill the chamber where the paint pod was with warm water, put the dip stick back in, close up and press the clean button. The cleaning cycle takes about ten minutes and shuts off automatically when it is finished. I didn't think my roller looked very clean after the first go so I repeated the process, the second time it was passable but still needed a quick rinse under the tap. I think the main purpose of this exercise is to clean out the inside of the tube the paint runs through, in the process parts of the system which had been perfectly clean ended up a bit of a mess and there was more watery paint marks everywhere as I emptied out the chambers, cleaned them out under the taps, cleaned my sink and put it all away.

Concluding Pros and Cons

On the plus side, the system is far quicker than using a regular brush and roller and after having just painted the entire upstairs of my house the old fashioned way, I would guess at it being about three or four times quicker. Other than the one glitch with set up which I think the instructions should be updated for, it was easy to put together and the cleaning cycle was straightforward to run as the instructions were generally of a good standard. The pod will not last forever, it is estimated it is good for about ten packs of paint, which would be enough for an entire average house I think. At an average £7 per paint pack value for money is reasonable, I tended to use a new brush and roller for every room I did so was spending this anyway. Having said that rollers for the pod system will need replacing from time to time as well, I am not in a position to say how often.

The major downside for me was the sheer mess. After painting my upstairs rooms, I finished each day with a little bit of paint on my hands and probably one or two spots on my clothes as well. I was not paying that much attention to the floors upstairs as they are being re-carpeted, but looking around and they are really not that bad despite having being left more or less uncovered. On the other hand, when I finished painting with the roller system, my clothes were absolutely covered in paint and I had to stop several times to wash as the palms of my hands would get covered in paint whilst I worked. Despite using dustsheets, my floor still ended up with quite a lot of paint splodge, as paint somehow would manage to splash far beyond the area I was actually working in. This might have been party my fault for overloading the paint, but it was very difficult to gauge for exactly how long the trigger button should be held for as the effect is not immediate. Fortunately I had wooden floors downstairs not carpets and managed to remove the splashed paint before it dried.
Another disadvantage is that there is a limited choice of colours and you cannot just use any paint in it.

I am in two minds as to whether to recommend it or not, it had a nice novelty factor but on balance I don't think there were huge advantages. I suppose if you can find a colour you like, are painting a very big area and don't mind mess it is just about worth considering. 

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