PRODUCT REVIEWS
Duxxback Decking www.greenbaydecking.com
Duxxbak Decking I hate the rain. I’m a native of
California. I never would have imagined that I would wind up living in Washington state. I’m used to having four distinct seasons: some rain in the fall and spring; warm, sunny and dry summers; and a fair amount of snow for the winter. How I long for those seasons. Seems as though here we get maybe two of the four if we’re lucky, and we haven’t been very lucky recently. According to my home weather monitoring station, for the last month (January), we had precipitation on 28 of the 31 days in the month and a monthly rainfall total of almost 12 inches. Suffice it to say that the weather here makes doing anything outside unpleasant at best. So, with this in mind, I wondered why more customers haven’t asked about decking products that also provide for a dry space below. I finally did get such an inquiry and it set me about searching for the right product. I found several below—deck guttering systems that seemed to be fraught with potential problems requiring cumbersome installations, rubber gasketing systems that were expensive and required special milling and tedious installations, aluminum decking systems that had an integral channel or gutter that diverted the water, and I quickly discovered that these decks were
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Deck Specialist
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Spring 2020
insanely loud during heavy rain and not really for residential installation. In addition to the noise, in the summer, the aluminum surface becomes too hot to touch, much less walk on. As I was beginning to think that there was no practical solution out there, I stumbled across the GreenBay Decking’s “No Drip Through Decking” product called DuxxBak. I reached out to regional sales manager Gary Daley and spent a couple of hours discussing the technical aspects of the product. Gary turned out to be an incredibly knowledgeable resource. Two days later a package arrived at my office with the DuxxBak sample pack enclosed. The first thing I noticed was that the samples were not just 4” chunks of the decking (which are too small to be helpful when deciding on color/texture). These were a full foot long, which is much more conducive to imagining what a whole deck of that color would look like. Upon examining the samples, the next thing that stood out to me was how light, yet rigid the product seemed to be. The hollow cells in the extrusion allow for the “boards” to be both light and stiff. Stiff enough in fact, that they are rated to span 24” on center joist spacing, which equates to fewer joists, more open and accessible joist bays and an overall easier job framing. This results in lower framing costs, I like it already!