URBAN BENCHES

Hey there! That’s a great question, and honestly, it’s one of the first things I ask any manufacturer before I trust their benches outside. The short answer? Yes — every single one of our outdoor benches goes through extreme temperature testing from -20°F (-29°C) all the way up to 110°F (43°C) and often even beyond that. Not just “we think it should work” — actual lab tests with thermal chambers, freeze-thaw cycles, and UV exposure combined with those temps. Here’s what that looks like. We take a bench, fully assembled, and put it in a cold chamber that drops to -20°F and holds it there for 12 hours. Then we yank it out and immediately move it to a hot chamber at 110°F for another 12 hours. That’s one cycle. We run 50 of those cycles on every new design. Why? Because wood expands and contracts, powder-coated steel can micro-crack, and plastic lumber — especially recycled HDPE — can warp or get brittle if it hasn’t been formulated right. After the 50 cycles, we check for hairline cracks at joints, any loosening of fasteners, color fading or chalking on the finish, and we do a flex test in the middle of the seat to see if the material lost any strength. For our wooden benches, like teak or acacia, we also do a separate humidity-freeze test because real world cold doesn’t come without some moisture. Water gets into tiny pores, freezes at -20°F, expands, and that’s how you get splitting. So we pre-condition the wood with a moisture cycle, then freeze it, then bake it at 110°F to simulate a dry summer. If the wood doesn’t crack after three rounds, we know it’s properly kiln-dried and sealed. For metal benches, we test the powder coat at both extremes — if it chips or flakes at -20°F, we reject it. If it gets tacky or soft at 110°F, that’s an automatic fail. We also leave benches outside on our test roof in Arizona and Minnesota for a full year, through real heat waves and polar vortex dips, because lab tests always miss something. Long story short: yes, we test for -20°F and 110°F, but more importantly, we test the *swing* between them, because that’s what actually kills outdoor furniture. If you’re in a place that hits those extremes, you won’t see warping, splitting, or color loss on our benches. If you ever do, we replace it — but after 8 years of these tests, that barely happens.