Eon Composite Decking opinion

My dad and I just finished putting a deck on my house made out of Eon composite decking (Home Depot is a Distributor). While the finished product is really nice looking and I'm extremely happy with it, I wanted to warn anyone considering it for their deck.

- First, it took more than two months for the special order from HD to arrive, and it all arrived piece-meal...some here, some there. Some of the material that arrived was damaged and had to be exchanged (causing more wait) and some was just plain incorrect and had to be reordered. As HD's top-of-the-line decking, they should really press the vendor and manufactuerer to have product available or able to get it in a timely manner.

- The installation manual has very precise instructions that need to be followed rigorously, this includes measuring for the frame. If you measure incorrectly, you're finished because you can't trim the baords to fit. There are also very detailed insturtion on how to cut boards, drill holes and install the mounting clips.

- Once we actually started working with the material, it was ridiculously hard to cut. Eon is a plastic/wood composite so as you cut it, the friction actually melts the material and it glues itself back together...so you have to go back and re-cut and pull at the same time to separate the pieces, then you have to file down any barbs or melted bits sticking out. This was the biggest hassle and the manual suggests some tips to reduce this (which included using a blade with less than 24 teeth and a slower saw, none of which seemed to work).

- The expansion and contraction of this stuff is crazy. We installed it when it was 93+ outside and we butted each joint up against each other. As it cools off, it contracts and at some points there are .25" gaps at joints. You really can't tell that much but it's there and I know it, so that bothers me.

- The stuff isn't exactly 'flame retardent'. It melts rather rapidly and violently. I didn't find this out until after I started building which is my fault for not doing thorough enough research on it, but I'm not putting a grill out there so it shouldn't matter.

Again, it's beautiful material just a real hassle to work with, thought I'd give anyone interested a heads up. I have pictures of the finished deck if anyone is interested.

 

Figured I'd go ahead and post pictures

 

Great looking deck; thaks for the info. I was looking into a ground level deck using some thing similar.

 

Looks beautiful!

 

Brim - looks great...does it matter if you use a diamond saw on it? or wet saw?

 

Thanks. Didn't try those because 1. didn't want to pay a crazy rental fee, 2. i doubt anyone locally has a 10-12" wet saw to rent. I did use cooking spray on the blade that helped marginally (no pun intended).