Installed by Side-Pro Exteriors across Seattle, Bellevue and Tacoma
Aluminum does not rot, does not burn and does not feed anything. On a wet coastal wall that is a short list of problems you never think about again.
FastPlank is a heavy-gauge 6063-T6 extruded aluminum plank system from Engage Building Products, installed with a clip-and-slide detail as an AAMA 508-certified pressure-equalised rainscreen with an air cavity behind. Planks come in 16-foot lengths in 4-inch and 6-inch V-notch profiles, finished either in AAMA 2604 powder coat or a woodgrain sublimation film over the same coating.
The material argument is the strong one. On a waterfront Gig Harbor or Tacoma elevation, or a shaded Seattle north wall, aluminum removes the failure modes that dominate the others on this site: it will not rot, will not absorb water, will not carry flame, and gives moss and algae nothing organic to feed on. The rainscreen cavity means the wall behind it dries rather than holding water against the sheathing.
The warranties are two documents. The product warranty runs fifty years and covers splitting, cracking and sustained deformation — defined as warping beyond one-eighth of an inch out of plane per linear foot. The finish warranty runs twenty years and covers chalk beyond a rating of 8 under ASTM D-4214 and color change beyond 5 units under ASTM D-2244.
We install FastPlank on homes and light commercial buildings across Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and the wider Puget Sound region, including the coastal exposures where it earns its price.
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Read the warranty conditions before the headline. The fifty-year figure is the product warranty; the appearance you actually live with — color and chalk — is covered for twenty. Neither warranty covers labor, and neither transfers: both are written for the original purchaser only, so they do not follow the house when you sell it. The product warranty also expressly excludes normal weathering, chalking, fading and mildew build-up. Engage states non-combustibility by reference to ASTM E136 and ASTM E84 compliance but does not publish a flame-spread index, so we quote the standards rather than a number.