Rising damp

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Edinburgh
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I have just bought a ground floor flat built around 1900's that has rising damp in almost every room. The worst areas back onto the bathroom which has a leaking downpipe so I'm fairly confident these can be sorted by fixing this. The rest of the flat I've stripped off all the vinyl wallpaper and started searching under the floor - the soil level reaches to the bottom of the floor joists so i'm hoping clearing out a lot of soil and rubble will increase the ventilation and dry the walls out. I wondered if creating a french drain along the back wall of the flat (backs onto the garden) will help? Also some of the plaster will need to be replaced using traditional lime plaster - I've read that the walls take an inch a year to dry out - does this mean you can't plaster until its dry...or just not paint until its dry?
I dont wish to use any of the new injectable DPC available.
 
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I've seen it on a few websites.. this is just one - http://www.heritage-house.org/damp.html ... it does seem a long time? ...but obviously if the property has been damp for a long time I'm concerned about replastering/decorating etc. if its all going to become damp again.
 
Feline, your link is to a commercial organization and they wrote the following:


"Once a wall is wet, it can take a long time to dry out. There is plenty of research out there which tells us how long it will take - the process depends on how warm the air around the wall is, how dry that air is and so on - but as a rule, if your wall is a metre thick (common in old stone built houses) it can take a year for each inch to dry out properly - so working from both sides - you'll dry two inches of wall a year."


So this is where you got your 1" a year from. What they claiming is a 1 metre wall would take 19 years to dry out - they are living in cloud cuckoo quack land. Also they don't provide references to the research they claim to have seen. It would depend on the type of stone used, but their rule of thumb does not take this into account.

I have had a brief look at other parts of their prose and will read more next week when I have time, but from what I have so far read, they are a quack outfit selling their services to the gullable with typical quack talk such as: "'allowing the walls to breath" and using copious ! !! !!!!! !! ! throughout the text.




I know a 92 year old gentleman who lives in a detatched house which I cannot stand to be in for more than a few minutes due to the smell/sense of damp downstairs. Summer or Winter, when I walk upstairs it is completely clear, but walk down the stairs and it hits you, but he is unaware of the damp and his wallpaper looks fine.

I have stopped rising damp in my home where it occurred in a small area, it is very easy - install a DPC that is 100% impermeable to the passage of water. In my house's case, an area of wall was damp and the skirting there had rotted with dry rot, but there was not the horrible damp house smell/sense. The cause was a DPC which was not 100% waterproof as it was made of layers of slate with morta inbetween AND ground wetter in that area compared to other outside walls of the house.
 
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as a rule, if your wall is a metre thick (common in old stone built houses) it can take a year for each inch to dry out properly.
Common my arse! Only in castles and fortresses mebbe. :rolleyes:

P.S. This is not a dig at you Wavey old boy, it is just how i cut n pasted.
 
Noseall, the gable walls in my house, in France, are about 1 metre thick, so are the older side walls (well over 100 years). The newer side walls (circa 100 years old) are about 850mm thick.

Would it be so different in the UK?
 
The majority of stone built houses in my area are 20 inches thick. There are some old farm houses with walls between 2 and 3ft thick.
They didn't build in metric here until 1970 so 1 metre is unlikely.
 
as a rule, if your wall is a metre thick (common in old stone built houses) it can take a year for each inch to dry out properly.
Common my a**e! Only in castles and fortresses mebbe. :rolleyes:

P.S. This is not a dig at you Wavey old boy, it is just how i cut n pasted.

Nosey, you did not read my post, and the entire thread. What you have quoted is from the website the lady provided which I then wrote that I consider to be quack. You should have realised I considered it stuff and nonsence. I will edit my previous post and add info to make matters more clear. You can then buy me a forum drink ;)

But back to Feline's post, the ground level (inside and outside) should be at least 150mm lower than DPC (is there a DPC?) and you should not paster untill walls are 'dry'.
 
You are pretty much on the right lines. The rule is an inch per month - but that obviously depends on conditions. Create as much ventilation as possible and use good quality lime mortar. When the mortar is surface dry you can paint but use a basic trade emulsion. This is more vapour permeable than ordinary emulsion. Also look at ventilation around the outside. Remove or reduce any heavy vegitation - bushes, shrubs etc.
 

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