Stay dry and clean with a simple spray.
How often have you wished that you had something waterproof? I don’t mean something water resistant, but something that could actually repel a liquid. Imagine clothes that never got wet (or dirty), a car that didn’t get covered in ice, a wooden fence that never rotted. Sounds too good to be true, right?
Meet NeverWet and Ultra-Ever Dry: Two spray-on hydrophobic products that repel liquids. According to their website, “NeverWet is a two-step product system designed to create a moisture repelling barrier on a variety of surfaces. It is suitable for use on metal, wood, aluminum, galvanized metal, PVC, concrete, masonry, asphalt, vinyl siding, fiberglass, canvas, most plastics and more.
Joey Provey reviewed NeverWet and tested two leather boots, one coated and the other not: “after five minutes of submersion, the leather became saturated, particularly around the stitching. Meanwhile, […] the one that I did spray with NeverWet—shed water effectively and came out of the tub as good as new.” He also tested the spray on an outdoor cushion with similar results.
SEE ALSO: Disaster-Ready Concrete Absorbs 880 Gallons of Water Per Minute
If you’re the kind of person who constantly gets coated in stains or loves to go out in the rain, you can purchase some NeverWet from Home Depot for as little as $20. It takes an hour or so to coat something since it is a two-step process, and each coat takes about half an hour to dry. Each pair of cans is good for 10 to 15 square feet of coating.
The sprays are not meant for high abrasion locations — for example, a road — but the coating can last for about a year. Be warned that it will be less effective if you’re coating something that you will be frequently touching, as the oil in your skin will interfere with the chemistry.
Both sprays leave a visible coat that has a hazy translucent white appearance, so it isn’t necessarily visibly pleasing. In fact, reviewers from Gizmodo weren’t impressed by NeverWet at all:
“The box claims that the coating dries to a ‘milky white haze,’ but what you really end up with is more along the lines of ‘someone vomited small amounts of white paint onto my belongings and left it in the sun to dry.’”
Whether or not the spray is right for you depends on what you want it for. But I think that I can safely say that it leads to some pretty entertaining experiments:
You might also like: Watch Water Travel Uphill, Navigate a Maze
Facebook comments