Rising Damp

From Yorkshire Times article entitled 'Rising Damp in Old Houses - It's just a myth'

I have been to two houses in the past couple of days, both of which have had damp proof courses (DPCs) injected into them. These new DPCs and associated work are now actually causing more damp problems than were there before!

One house has evidence of approximately two injected DPCs and the owner was being recommended to have another one. I bumped into a neighbour who had seen the original plans for the houses in the Glamorgan Archive and guess what, it turns out that it has had a DPC since the day it was built!! 

What are we doing believing damp proof 'specialists' from commercial damp proof companies? Their 'free' surveys might not cost anything, but the recommended treatments that they come up with with see thousands of pounds leave your account. So much for being 'free'.

So in the first house, there was a lot of damp all around the front bay and along the west facing wall. The damp 'specialist' failed to identify that there were a number of large cracks in the render, or that the render on the bay was blown. Neither did he mention anything to do with the lack of ventilation in the house, .......

In the second house, the damp was now appearing over a metre from the ground. No doubt that there was damp in the floor of the house, but sealing up the wall as a cure, really?? That is just trying to hide the damp, not to actually deal with it. Now the owner will have to remove all the hard waterproof render and start again with a proper solution. More expense, disruption and hassle. Why?!

If you are serious about solving a damp problem, rather than causing one we would recommend that you use a good independent damp specialist in older buildings. We could save the 'hard working families' of the UK lots of un-necessary expense and also help to preserve our built heritage rather than introducing ridiculous ineffective modern quick fixes.

For a good rant, have a read of the Yorkshire Times article here