After putting up the drywall and finishing the walls in my basement room it was finally time to apply some primer and paint. I was going to just use a regular paint roller, but I had a unique chance to try out the new Wagner TurboRoll Power Paint Roller and I’m glad I did.

The Wagner TurboRoll Power Paint Roller

You see, after I wrote about painting my house this summer I was contacted by a gentleman from Wagner who asked me some questions about my project. One thing led to another and he sent me two free TurboRoll Powered Paint Rollers to try in my basement. In the interest of full disclosure, I received these two TurboRoll Power Paint Rollers in exchange for this unbiased review.

I usually use a plain old disposable paint roller with the traditional method of pouring the paint into the paint tray, running the roller into the tray and applying the paint to the wall. The process of painting with roller is about 100 times faster than with a brush, but it’s also a process that punctuated with lots of mess and moving paint around from can to tray to roller to wall.

The Wagner TurboRoll Powered Paint Roller takes a lot of that messy manual work and makes it relatively neat and speedy. It’s battery-powered, remarkably clean and snap to use. Everything is reusable, so it’s actually a little better for the environment than normal disposable paint supplies. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn close.

At its heart the Wagner TurboRoll is a self-feed paint roller, essentially a giant syringe that holds paints and pushes it through a specially designed roller. But unlike most other tube paint rollers, you don’t need to manually a move plunger in an out. The “turbo” part of the TurboRoll consists of a little battery-powered motor (four AA batteries) that automatically pushes the plunger in and out. The Turboroll is pretty easy to operate: it’s just a two button switch that runs the plunger in one direction or the other.

Set Up and Assembly

There are a lot of little parts when you first open the box and start using it, but it all becomes pretty clear once you get started. The instructions were clear and easy to follow and I had the TurboRoll assembled in about five minutes. You essentially just lube a few pieces with petroleum jelly, snap a few parts together, screw on the tube and load in the batteries and you’re ready to paint. I was a little concerned about most of the parts being made out of plastic, but once assembled it was pretty sturdy and well-balanced.

The plastic lid and suction hose that comes with the TurboRoll helps make paint loading a completely spotless task.

To load the TurboRoll with paint you snap on a plastic paint can lid with a suction tube over a regular one gallon can of paint. The lid for traditional paint cans is included, though you can buy other lid types for non-traditional paint cans. Like other self-feed paint tubes, you “suck” in the paint through a special one-way valve from paint lid suction tube. I found that I had to press the roller down fairly solidly onto the suction tube to get the suction started, but once it was going I didn’t have a problem. I loaded up the TurboRoll with white latex primer and started to paint my drywall. My wife simply said, “Wow…” when she saw that I opened the box, assembled the TurboRoll, loaded it with paint and was rolling paint on the wall without a drop… all within about 10 minutes.

Painting with the Wagner TurboRoll

It took a few seconds of constant button pushing to load up the roller and thin tube with paint, but once I started seeing paint oozing through the roller head I was good to go. It took me a couple minutes to get the feel for how often I had to push the button to load more paint to the roller, but eventually I settled into a pattern of four or five large sweeps with the roller and then I’d tap the button for a second or two with my thumb to push the plunger another half inch or so. The primer went on very smoothly as long as I kept the roller adequately fed with paint. Every 10 minutes or so I’d stop and refill the tube, which probably took about 30 seconds or so each time.

The roller was pretty good quality and I went through my whole 12′ x 19′ basement room with it. The TurboRoll paint tube did have a little heft to it when it was full, but it wasn’t full for very long and it was the right thickness for my hand. The little motor inside the plastic housing didn’t sound very tough when it ran, but the plunger moved in and out well and the batteries lasted through my whole paint job (using a full gallon of paint in about an hour) without any signs of slowing. The handle and button operation is very similar to holding a fishing rod. Your hand wraps around the handle and the button is entirely operated with your thumb.

I generally don’t like painting, but this actually paint the whole process sort of fun. I didn’t use a drop cloth because my basement floors are essentially “unfinished”, but I was amazed at how very few drops there were. The TurboRoll isn’t magic: if you put too much paint on the wall roll through it too fast you will get some paint to splatter, but generally this was a remarkably clean process. The paint shield caught a lot of little splattering dots and I dripped almost nothing onto the floor throughout the whole process. When I was done the primer can still looked brand new and didn’t have a speck of mess around it because I wasn’t pouring paint out of it. I joked about filling it with water and returning it to the store for a refund because no one would believe that I’d actually USED all the primer in the can and left it that clean.

Overall, painting was very comfortable and relatively fast, though there were a few awkward spots where the TurboRoll’s size got in the way. When I was painting the left inside corner of a wall I found that I had to flip the TurboRoll upside down to get as close to the wall as possible. Hitting the buttons upside-down was a little odd, but not difficult. The manual warns also you about pinching fingers or clothes in the plunger mechanism as it goes in. Yes, I did manage to pinch my hand once.

And the TurboRoll itself actually gets “longer” as the plunger part of the paint tube pulls back to suck in more paint. When you first fill the TurboRoll with paint the back of plunger is sticking out the back of the TurboRoll handle by a good two feet or so. This is only a drawback if you’re painting in a tight space, and as you push out more paint the TurboRoll’s stick gets shorter. To be fair, most self-feed paint tubes have this problem and I would have had similar (if not worse) issues if I’d used a roller on a wooden extension pole. It’s also important to realize that when the plunger is extended out the reach of the TurboRoll doesn’t really change. I was painting seven foot walls in a basement, so I had no problems. But I might have had a hard time if I was using the TurboRoll in a room with high ceilings.

When I was done I popped the top off the lid and I was impressed to see that it had sucked up about 99% of the primer in the can, leaving very little waste.

The “cordless” aspect of the Wagner TurboRoll should not be overlooked. The ability to move around the room freely without being tied down with any cords or paint tubes tied to buckets was also pretty liberating. I used a powered paint roller years ago that was attached to a bucket of paint. It was okay, but I was always getting tangled in the cord, paint hose or more often than not, both.

Clean Up

Paint is messy and there’s no force on earth that’s going to prevent that. As long as you accept this fact then you’ll be impressed with the Wagner TurboRoll’s cleanup. To clean the tube and roller and paint top Wagner recommends filling a bucket with water (I had latex primer) and basically sucking water in an out of the whole mechanism over and over again to clean it out. For this you switch the plunger to “manual” mode so you can move it in and out quickly and easily.

This worked well, but I found that my bucket was water was soon REALLY thick with paint and I had to move to a new bucket of water and hose to really get everything as clean as it should be. I don’t have a washbasin of any sort in my home (and I wasn’t even going to try carrying it all through the house to the bathtub), so I had to move outside to really give everything a proper cleaning.

Overall I thought cleaning the TurboRoll was just about on par with what you’d do if you were painting manually. It’s still a messy and sometimes wet process. I cleaned the roller out fairly well and I can probably use it for one more job before I’ll feel the need to replace it.

New rollers only cost about $6, which I think is pretty fair for the amount of use I can get out of it and the convenience of using the TurboRoll. In addition to replacing the rollers every so often you’ll want to have some extra petroleum jelly handy to lube up the rubber gaskets after each use. One roller and one small tube of petroleum jelly was included in the box with the TurboRoll.

Wagner has even put together a short TurboRoll video commercial so you can see the basics. The “before” portion is a little overdone, but the TurboRoll really is remarkably, neat, clean and fast to use.

If you use oil paint you’ll need to clean the Wagner TurboRoll with paint thinner, but the logistics of filling a bucket full of paint thinner escape me. I generally only use latex paint simply because it’s easier for a do-it-yourself guy like myself, but professional painters might have some cleaning tricks that I’m unaware of.

Conclusions

The Wagner TurboRoll Powered Paint Roller was remarkably easy to use and was surprisingly effective at making a routine paint job a clean and quick affair. If I have to guess, I’d say that the time it took me to apply my first coat of primer was probably cut in half by using the TurboRoll. I didn’t have to worry about spilling paint out of the can, messy drips around the tray or trails of paint from my paint tray to the wall. Clean-up at the end of the project was no better and no worse than any other paint project I’ve done, so on speed alone the TurboRoll is a worthwhile investment.

There are a few cases where the Wagner TurboRoll may not meet every need: if you only have a very small room to paint (a powder room or 1/2 bath) or you have a room with a very high ceiling then you may not be able to use the TurboRoll to it’s full advantage.

I would recommend the Wagner TurboRoll Powered Paint Roller to anyone who has a one more medium to large rooms to paint in a hurry. The Wagner TurboRoll pretty much pays for itself after the first job or two when you’ve managed to apply two coats of paints in the time it used to take you to apply one. If you’ve never tried a self-feed paint roller, this is the one to go for. It offers most of the conveniences of the others with the added bonus of being button-operated instead of manually controlled.

Overall, the Wagner TurboRoll Power Paint Roller is a very good battery-operated and neat self-feed paint roller that lays down an even and consistent coat of paint in about half the time that it might take to use a traditional paint tray and roller.