Customer Reviews

Wagner Wide Shot Power Painter Backpack Paint Sprayer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I felt the need to post a review about the Wagner Power Painter, because I've read many poor reviews about it and had many of the same frustrations with the product, initially. The fact is that this product is not for every project, but it is a huge time saver for projects that have a large coverage area (houses, decks, fences, large rooms, ceilings).

First off, you cannot just pour paint into the thing and start painting. Take it apart, and make sure everything is properly lubricated with the provided oil. Next, if you're using latex-based paint, THIN the paint using FLOETROL (this is a MUST). Using Floetrol helps the issue that some people have with the unit seizing. Refer to the back of the Floetrol bottle for "airless sprayers" to know how much to put in the paint. I would not recommend thinning the paint with water, or the unit may gum up. Cover/tape adjacent surfaces well, as the excess spray can reach several feet away, and the wind doesn't help!

Get a large piece of cardboard or scrap wood and play with the pressure settings until you find a good coverage pattern. This took me less than 5 minutes. After that, you just need to be confident with using a paint sprayer, which will come with practice.

The unit will start to spit when the bottle is getting low. I habitually refill after one pass of a 10' X 10' area, just to avoid this. Keep a brush or small roller handy to clean up spots where this might occur. Clean up time should be less than 20 minutes. I clean brushes and rollers longer than that, usually.

I was ready to return this product after using it once. It spat and dripped and seized up. After doing some reading, I realized I just wasn't using it properly. If you follow the steps above, you should have very good results. This is a really great product, once you get used to it.

I've used this one, and my older Wagner Power Painter, with latex paints and latex solid stains for several years now with no problems at all.

1. I lubricated with a brief stream (not a few drops)of household oil before and after cleaning with EVERY use.

2. Use the viscosity stick gauge as per the directions to thin latex before attempting to spray it. Never, ever, try spraying unthinned latex. In that case you're just begging for piston seizure! I always thin latex with water-it's cheap and the only drawback is that doing that does dilute your latex (this is stated in the manual), and you might need to spray a second coat-big deal.

3. When I've finished painting, I clean with only water (remember, I've only used this with latex so far), and then a second brief stream of oil.

I bought my first Wagner Power Painter in 1993, and it's still working great!

I found that this sprayer works good if you read and follow the directions in the owner's manual. Also, I have few tips of my own. I recently sprayed my entire house with a wide shot sprayer. After you assemble the sprayer put a few drops of oil in the intake. Make sure the tip holder is screwed in tight and check it while you spray. If you use the hose intake I found that it easier to drill 1/2" holes in the lid and shove the hoses into the bucket. That way you won't spill all the paint if the bucket tips over. If you use the cup, fill it often and make sure it never goes below half full. That way you reduce the chance of sucking air into the intake which tends to cause the gun to "spatter". If you do get spatters, just smooth them out with brush, and respray lightly over. Be aware that this unit can push out a lot of paint so you need to fill your pail or cup often. For cleanup, disassemble and rinse everything with water and place the parts in mineral spirits. I use mineral spirits for cleanup on all my spray equipment. It will dissolve most paint materials and it does have lubricating qualitiies. For spraying heavy latex or acrylic paints, there really isn't anything like the wide shot.

PRO's:
- FAST! Gets the job done in a flash!
- Relatively easy to clean-up
- Controllable spray settings
- Simple to use

CON's:
- Doesn't suck up paint from bottom of jar
- Difficult to pour paint into jar
- Doesn't work very well on the small item settings
- Overspray

This thing is AWSOME for large difficult paint projects. For example, painting shutters, fences, siding, etc. It is probably not nearly as useful for small projects because it sprays a lot of paint and clean-up time may be too great. However, for large projects, it puts on a good amount of paint very quickly and clean-up isn't a huge deal because of how much time you've just saved.

Clean-up probably takes about 20 mintues and is not that hard (I normally spend about 10-15 cleaning a brush).

Today, I painted 26 vinyl window shutters with this Wagner. The tough part was getting them down and washing all of them first. I setup a huge plastic tarp on my driveway to dry the shutters and another tarp to paint on. This Wagner needs to be used mostly upright when using the attached canister, so I needed to put the shutters upright. I simply nailed two finish nails onto a saw horse. Then each shutter simply popped onto the saw horse using the two nails through the middle peg holes in the shutter. Part of the trick to painting shutters, by the way, is to paint them up-side-down so you don't miss any spots where people can see them. That is, when shutters are on the house, people will look UP at them, so they see the underside and not the top. Turning the shutter up-side-down allows you to get good coverage on the bottom.

Each shutter took only about 45 seconds to paint! No joke! By hand, I would have spent at least 15 minutes each because of all the corners, etc. I will be putting a second coat on the shutters tomorrow, but I could get by with just one coat, if I wanted to.

Although I painted over a 10'x10' tarp, I still got a fair amount of overspray on my driveway. However, it was a bit windy today, so it's probably my fault. Power-washer to the rescue! One thing that really helped me was to make a windsock out of a plastic shopping bag tied to a post. Then I would turn the saw horse in the direction of the wind to keep the overspray away from me. You WILL get sprayed, so remove your watch, etc. so you don't have to scrub paint droplets off of it later.

After reading some of the reviews for this product, I was somewhat skeptical that this product would work. Well, it actually did work and saved me an enormous amount of time on a large paint project. Here's the deal: The paint went on fine but in places it was uneven or too thick. Occassionally, it splattered. But, for these problems, I just rolled over them with a paint roller I had on hand and kept on trucking. The most important thing was to make sure the paint was even and to ensure that I had reduced the excess. The paint job looks great and I've gotten a lot of complements. I feel relatively certain that, by using this technique, I cut the time it took for my job by a factor of four. To me, that makes it well worth the $$. The large paint container on this model makes it much faster than the others. Cheers!

I had to give this nice little sprayer 5 stars because it was truly a time saver for me. I had a HUGE fence to paint, and I had only 2 days to do it before leaving on a trip. This sprayer did the trick. I used it without the hoses, I just poured the stain on the container and painted...WOW can this thing paint fast! I did not have any major issues with it, it worked wonderfully and did the job it was supposed to do. Spray pattern was constant with good paint flow. I did not experience major mist of the paint that could fly and get deposited at a neighbor's house, for example. I did experience minor dripping of the paint sometimes via the tip, but nothing alarming and not every time, I would say it looked normal just depending on the setting the tip is in, wider or narrower spray pattern. I cleaned mine with mineral spirits and it worked wonderfully. I followed the instructions carefully and did not have any problems. I would recommend it.

I've never been motivated to buy a Wagner painting product. They have great marketing, and do a good job of training sales people at home centers and hardware stores to swear by their products. The problem is that they are selling professional performance from mass-produced, consumer appliances.

In my case, I'm a DIY'er and just finished drywalling, mudding, and taping my basement. My wife bought the sprayer, thinking it would greatly reduce my time on task, priming every square foot of drywall installed -- walls and ceilings.

I took the sprayer out of the box, connected and lubricated as specified, put the pickup hose in the 5 gal. bucket as instructed, put on my goggles and NIOSH-approved mask, and started/attempted to "paint".

My experience: the device is noisy and vibrates more than my pneumatic jitterbug sander; even with the flow adjustment wide-open the coverage is insufficient; every time I released the trigger an air pocket developed that forced it to spit globs of paint when spraying resumed; and the bucket clip did not hold so the pickup hose would slip off the bucket and drag/drain paint across the floor.

Needless to say, by the time I cleaned-up the mess and sprayer parts, I had lost any time that may have been saved vs using a good old, reliable roller, pan, and extension handle. My advise: stay away from this until they get it right...unless, you're just bored and are looking for new sources of frustration in your life.

I was really skeptical about buying one of these because of all the bad reviews i've read here on Amazon about the Wagner sprayers. I decided to take a chance and pick one up at my local HD recently figuring I could return it more easily than having to deal with shipping it back.
Well, it took a little getting used to, but after a few test sprays, I had it laying down a perfect coat of oil-based (Zinnser) primer. Took me about 20 minutes to do both sides of 15 cabinet doors. WOW! Would have taken me all day to do by hand.
Clean up is a bit of a b!@tch, but the time I saved was worth it!

Didn't work in the first use. Paint cup fell off 3 times causing me to lose a quart of expensive paint and made a horrible mess. Cup wouldn't stay on no matter how well I tightened it. Burped and spit out globs of paint periodically during the first use, especially when paint level got down to about a third of the cup. This is probably due to the filter on the uptake being too tall, so that air is drawn in. That's a serious design flaw. Unit is uncomfortable to hold (intense buzzy vibration) and noisy enough to wake the dead. Cheap plastic case hinge broke when I opened it the first time. I found nothing to like about this sprayer.

Yes, we read the instructions. Yes we did all the cleaning. We got 6, repeat, 6 uses out of this before it just stopped permanently. We paid $100 for this set so, it cost us $16 per use. We could have rented a pro sprayer and been done in far less time, not mention the aggravation. A friend of mine had a Wagner Power painter 10 years ago (one of the first models) and she had the same experience. Wagner apparently learned nothing since then, and we will never buy another Wagner product!