Damp Inspections: Why Your Home Needs Regular Checks

There is a myth that damp only affects old houses, but in truth, it can occur in any property. Weather conditions, construction flaws, and lifestyle habits can all bring moisture into your home, even if it’s a new one. Untreated damp can devastate properties and cause real health and safety risks. This article will explore these risks in more detail, as well as explain how you can check your home for damp and why you should do so regularly.

Structural Damage

While damp does not suddenly strike buildings, it can progress surprisingly quickly and do a lot of damage. At first, you might notice that your house smells musty or that the walls are peeling, which may not seem like urgent issues. However, they might only be the tip of the iceberg. Inside those damp walls, moisture could be corroding metal fixings and causing issues like wet rot, which weakens wooden structures and makes your home unsafe.

Moisture can also seep into your insulation, rendering it ineffective and making your home colder and less comfortable. In short, the longer damp is left unchecked, the more damage it will do, and the more difficult and costly it will be to fix.

Health Risks

As if making your home uncomfortable and unsafe wasn’t bad enough, damp can also have a direct effect on the health of you and your family. The moisture creates an ideal breeding ground for mould, mildew, and dust mites, which can aggravate respiratory conditions like asthma. But even in healthy people, and especially children and the elderly, damp can cause coughing, sneezing, skin irritation, and eye discomfort. Living in a damp home has also been linked to mental health issues.

Common Damp Types and Causes

Knowing what causes damp can help you know where to look when you do an inspection. There are several possible causes, with one of the easiest to look for being damage or defects on the exterior that could let water inside. This can include insufficiently sealed windows, missing roof tiles, and wall cracks. Checking for these and spotting them early means you can fix them before damp becomes a problem.

Condensation is another common cause of damp that is easy to look for, as it causes windows to mist up. However, damp can also be caused by construction flaws. These are hard to inspect, so you need to regularly check your home for symptoms of damp too. Check for cold, wet patches, mould, and powdery salt deposits on interior surfaces. Bubbling, peeling, or sagging surfaces are also telltale signs of damp, along with soft or crumbling timber.

When to Call the Experts

For homes simply being lived in with no existing damp issues, regular self-inspections are a valuable first line of defence against damp. However, for homes in the process of being sold or suffering from persistent damp issues, professional damp proofing services should be called to do a proper survey. With specialist equipment and a trained eye, they can make sure no subtle signs of damp are overlooked.

To schedule a professional damp survey for your home today, call London Damp Proofing Ltd on 0208 226 6330.