I put transparent penetrating oil, the goal was to make it easier to refinish later. With the opaque stain it becomes exactly like a paint, peels off and then you need to sand the whole thing. With the oil you can just clean the wood and add more
From experience, only use clear stain or sealant on a deck, even on pressure treated pine. Colored stains and sealants look awful after a couple of years.
Not trying to be critical but this old house used to be a gold standard for information. Cedar is most commonly used after pressure treated for decks/fences and wasn't covered. The information lacked technical depth - you should cover water-based, oil-based, penetrating, the pros/cons. Prep work including sanding. Commonly used techniques/tools for applying on decks and fences. How often to re-apply on vertical vs horizontal surfaces. Pre-filling cracks.
When I was building my deck, folks told me to use western red cedar because it was half the cost of ipe. But cursory research revealed that ipe was more than twice as strong as cedar, so I could use half the thickness and actually save money. It worked great. Incidentally, another This Old House video said one could not use a stain or oil finish on ipe because of the high oil content of the wood. So?...
Who tha' hell can afford mahogany, especially "underfoot"?!? And for the superich who can, uhm, will they DIY it?!? Sorry, this was kinda of silly examples of wood to teach us how stains work...which by the way, they didn't even tell us that, they just showed three types of stain.
Bear stain sucks. Applied per instructions. Lasted one year. Had bear rep come out to my house inspected my deck and instructed me how to remove old stain, sand deck and apply stain. He came back out to inspect my deck after I did what he said to do. Gave me the ok to restain my deck. Well it lasted one year and it was in worse condition then the original problem. Bear stop being cheap on your products.
