If your render has gone green or grey, you have two honest options, and the render painting vs cleaning cost gap between them is wider than most people expect. You can have the render cleaned, or you can have it repainted. One is a few hundred pounds. The other runs into thousands.
We get asked about this most weeks around Thirsk and Northallerton, usually after a painter has quoted someone for a full redecoration on a wall that did not need it. So here is the plain version: what each route costs, when each is the right call, and how the two compare once you look past the first year.
Render painting vs cleaning cost over ten years
A soft wash to clean a stained render wall is typically £350 to £500 on an average semi, with the exact figure depending on access, the height of the wall and how heavy the growth is. Repainting render properly, which means clean, repair, prime and two coats of a breathable masonry paint, is usually £3,500 to £5,000.
Now stretch it across a decade. A cleaned render tends to need another wash every three to four years, so call it three cleans over ten years. Three cleans still come in well under fifteen hundred pounds. A good breathable paint system lasts ten to fifteen years on paper, but you have paid the full lump up front and you have changed the wall for good. Once render is painted it usually needs repainting again later rather than just a wash, so the redecoration cost tends to repeat. Cleaning keeps the wall in its original state, which leaves your options open. Painting commits you to a maintenance cycle that only a painter benefits from.
When a stained render only needs cleaning
Most of the green and black on a render wall is biological. It is algae, with some lichen, living off damp and shade, and it sits on the surface rather than in the render itself. A low pressure soft washing treatment kills it at the root and the original colour comes back.
If the render is sound and the colour underneath is still good, cleaning is the answer and repainting render is money spent on a problem you do not actually have. This is the most common case we see. A wall that has gone heavily green on the shaded, north-facing side while the sunny elevation still looks fine is almost always a cleaning job, not a paint job. Our render cleaning service is built for exactly this, the wall that looks tired but is structurally fine.
When repainting actually makes sense
Paint earns its keep when the render has failed, not just got dirty. Hairline crazing across a whole elevation, patchy colour that will never even out, or simply wanting a different colour: those are redecoration jobs, and the render redecoration cost is what it is. If the surface is cracked or blown, no clean will fix it, and you are into render restoration options rather than a wash.
The test we use is simple. If a clean would bring it back, clean it. If a clean would not, you are repainting. Most walls we look at fall on the cleaning side of that line, which is not what a painter is going to tell you.
Getting an honest read before you spend
The mistake we see again and again is paying repaint money for a cleaning job. A painter sells paint, so a painter sees a repaint. We will tell you if it does not need doing yet.
If you want eyes on it, we cover Thirsk and the surrounding area for free quotes, and we will say plainly whether a soft wash will sort it or whether the wall is genuinely past cleaning. Either way you will know what you are spending and why, before anyone gets a ladder out.