Recently I needed to paint a house, not a huge house, a smallish two bedroom house however I did need to paint all the walls and the ceilings so there was a fair amout of painting needed.

I had noticed the Dulux PaintPod in B&Q (I am in the UK, its a bit like Home Depot). I thought that if I was ever going to get use out of a device like this then now was the town. Having been quizzed about what I thought about this device by friends I  thought it would be useful to organise my thoughts.

The PaintPod is a device that pumps a regulated amount of paint up a tube to a roller head. Its intended to be used anywhere you can use a regular paint roller with the main advantage being that you do not have to keep refilling the roller meaning that painting progresses much faster.

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The Good Bits

  1. its very clean, I did put down sheets but they were hardly needed and I’m not usually the neatest painter
  2. the coverage estimate on the tins of paint are pretty accurate, possibly because the paint flow is metered.
  3. the paint quality is excellent, mostly it covered in just one coat and even when patchy touching up by doing a part coat it was invisible when dry.
  4. I have seen some blog posts saying that getting the flow rate right can be tricky but I found it very easy to get the hang of it.
  5. the triangular edging brush supplied is a bit of a gimmick but does work surprisingly well

The Not So Good Bits

  1. the paint is more expensive than regular paint
  2. the self cleaning system is really only good for cleaning the tube, you still need to clean the roller yourself
  3. setting up the device and the cleaning cycle does take about about half an hour in total, so even though the device is quicker to use you do need to be painting a reasonably large amount to make it worth while to use it.
  4. the range of colours is not great

Other things

I did get my hands on a PainPod Compact and it seemed OK, but I would be concerned about going through batteries. The compact does not have the cleaning system of the original model, but I think that given the limitations of the original’s cleaning system I’m not sure that is much of a disadvantage.

Obviously the cutting in still needs to be done and there is not real speed up for this task.

I had two roller heads and one was manufactured incorrectly the feed roller kept sticking and the paint just poured out of the head at each end especially when doing ceilings, I’ve only ever tried two heads so its not a statistically significant sample but it does make me worry slightly about build quality. On the up side B&Q did refund the money.

I did try it with other paint, not designed for the device, not cheap paint, other Dulux paint, however it didn’t work very well so it appears that you really do need to use the approved paint  The painting was done in France and the local Dulux Valentine PaintPod paint was perfectly fine, however only larger stores carry it in stock smaller ones can take a week to order it in.

Overall I would recommend this device – it does work.