How to paint your Flare Fire

We often get asked, ‘Can you paint a Flare outdoor fireplace?’, the answer is yes.

When our outdoor fireplaces leave the Flare Fires factory they come to our customers with a natural concrete finish. Most customers leave them like that, some stone and schist their fire, others plaster and paint them.

Painting a fully plastered fire – to colour match your house

A fire that has been plastered with a normal mesh-based plaster system — as commonly used on houses, can then be painted with pretty much any house paint, making it super easy to match the colour of your house or other surrounding surfaces.

There are two factors to consider with this option:

1. The additional cost of the plaster system
2. The fire needs to be fully waterproofed, with a chimney cap to reduce the chance of water seeping through cracks and bubbling the paint.

Painting the concrete directly – to create a stand-out centrepiece

To paint the concrete directly, and not have the paint bubble and blister — there is a very specific paint to use and a specific way to get it done successfully.

Because of the limitations in paint options that will survive the heat of being directly on the concrete — don’t expect to be able to colour match to your house, rather, use this option to create a stand-out centrepiece.

Watch the video below to learn how

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS VIDEO:

• This video is not going to teach you how to paint or show you all the techniques around painting. If you don’t know how to paint, engage a professional.
• We recommend using a PeterFell Tinted Sealer. It’s not like a traditional paint that you would use on your house. We’ve selected this paint for its ability to cope with the heat generated by a Flare Fire and its ability to look good even when your fire has hairline cracks.
• We don’t warranty or sell this paint – paint at your own risk.
• Don’t try to colour match your house – of the multiple colours in the PeterFell range, we only really recommend iron and black.
• It is really important to make sure that your fire is free from moss and mould. We recommend you use any brand of moss and mould spray that you can get from a hardware store and just follow the instructions on the label. This means you may have to do that a few days or a week before you paint your fireplace.
• We also recommend you waterproof your fire before you paint, click here to view our waterproofing video.
• Again, whilst this is not a lesson in painting, we do recommend that you do not paint in hot weather as it can make the paint go off too quickly.
• You will need to apply the PeterFell Tinted Sealer with a sprayer. If you brush or roll the paint on, it is pretty much impossible to avoid brush or roller marks.
• You can use a traditional air sprayer with an airline and compressor. The only problem is there can be a fair bit of overspray and paint dust.
• PeterFell recommends an airless sprayer, which in this video you will see Mike has chosen to use the Wagner W95 airless sprayer as it is super-fast, super easy and affordable.

How and where to order paint

The paint used in this video is a Satin Tinted Sealer. This can be directly purchased from PeterFell.

The quantity of paint you will need to purchase is dependant on fireplace model and application of paint to the fireplace. Between 5 and 10 litres was used when painting the Premier outdoor fireplace in our video. Approximately 10 litres should be a sufficient amount to cover painting most of our outdoor fireplace models.

For any further questions or help in any way, please contact our friendly team, they will be happy to help.