Rising Damp And How To Stop It
The Rising Damp may sound like a B movie thriller, but it is a real problem for people living in homes that aren’t properly waterproofed! Water can actually flow upwards inside walls from the wet ground through materials like wood, stone, and brick that appear to be solid, but are actually porous. A natural phenomenon called capillary action, the same process that sends blood throughout our bodies, draws the groundwater slowly upward through the wall.
The water travelling up through the wet walls in a house contains salts from the groundwater that are carried along with it. When the moisture eventually evaporates, the salts will be left behind, forming a powdery white tidemark called efflorescence. Typically, the rising damp reaches a height of 1.5 metres, but the salts can reach higher, creating an unsightly mess.
Most walls are protected by something called a damp course, which consists of a waterproof layer in your wall that breaks the course of the capillary action running up through the building material’s pores. In older buildings, it is often the case that the structure’s original damp-proof course has been damaged and bridged, allowing the damp to rise again! If this is what has happened, the best rising damp treatment is to have a new damp-proof course installed that will put a stop to the problem.
There are a number of ways that your damp proof course can become bridged. It’s possible that your structure’s internal plaster might have a direct connection to the flooring at the internal wall’s bottom. It’s also possible that the wall cavity may contain debris within it that was left behind by builders accidentally during construction. If the debris rises to a higher level than the damp proof course, it will provide a bridge for the water to travel up from the ground. Yet another cause of damp course bridging is new construction, for example, if you have recently built a new sidewalk or added a flowerbed to your property near the wall it can give the water a new way in without you realizing it!
It isn’t always easy to identify the source of a damp problem, and it’s always possible there could be a source of damp on your property that you haven’t yet discovered. This is why your best course of action is to contact a damp specialist to make a visit and use their experience and expertise to ferret out the cause. Consider that if there is damp visible higher than 1.5 metres up on your wall then rising damp probably isn’t the culprit. If you are seeing unevenly distributed damp patches it’s possible your property might have a problem due to one of the other common damp disturbances like penetrating damp or condensation.
If you would like to order a free damp survey of your property by one of our damp proofing specialists, just give us a call on 0208 226 6330, email us at [email protected], or submit our online form for general questions about our services. We are here to keep you safe and dry!