Becoming a damp proofer!!

[noseall]

well there you have it!

joe-90 is the resident expert on damp and its miracle cure.

you get yourself set up Andy and become yet another shining knight doing an honest days work curing properties up and down the nation.

beware though, there are failures to the treatment.

yes failures, honestly! unbelievable i know!

but this is the clever part, those guarantees you give out ain't worth the paper they were written on. besides, you will have took your money and run before they have chance to getcha!

ffs

 

[joe-90]

I've never seen a gorilla in the wild but I'm sure they exist as other people obviously have. Same with damp. You may live in an area that has little.

 

[Thermo]

ive seen a needles eye

 

[Shytalkz]

Ah, but have you seen a third nipple?

 

[noseall]

I've never seen a gorilla in the wild but I'm sure they exist as other people obviously have. Same with damp. You may live in an area that has little.

damp does not discriminate joe it is omnipresent.

i did not say that it doesn't exist either, read my previous posts.

damp appears in many differing forms.

for a damp proofing expert to arbitrarily state that he can cure all with a squirt of silicone or have the diagnostic instincts to identify it origins is quite remarkable.

i'm fairly sure Andy will be able to make such claims as soon as he has his van sign-written.

 

[Thermo]

Ah, but have you seen a third nipple?

i heard a rubber band

 

[andy2306]

I can see the womens faces when my van turns up with

"Got a damp, moist area???? I'll cure it with one injection!"

If you read my posts I was saying that i wanted to be an expert not a cowboy, If i wanted to be a cowboy, I could go out tomorrow and do it??

 

[Joe Malone]

Fine if Andy wants to set himself up as a damp proofer but the reality is that 99% 0f damp problems can be cured at source using small building works.

I acknowledge that there are sometimes pragmatic reasons for injecting walls eg what if a neighbours yard has higher ground levels and is draining against your wall which is at a lower level?
Nothing you can do about his ground levels so injecting the wall might be the only solution. Academic research places the incidence of rising damp at anywhere between 5 and 30% in damp properties; the lower end of the scale is the more popular proposition. Damp proofing companies should be making the vast amount of their money from small building works or for specifying to remedy condensation damp problems. It's my experience that in almost 100% of cases these companies visit and always specify works for rising damp.

So the incidence of rising damp encountered by them is drastically out of kilter with the academic research. Rising damp exists, that isn't the great con, it's firstly, the fact that the damp proofing industry would have us believe it's a common problem and secondly that they'd have us believe that injecting the walls is the only solution. It was recently explained to me by a leading damp proofing company that the reason the industry got such a bad name was because anyone could hire the equipment and set themselves up as damp proofing experts without adhering to industry codes of practice or governance by the PCA.

I don't accept this, I've found just as many examples of PCA members flouting the industry codes and the PCA do almost nothing to regulate the industry. They're a political body funded by its members and existing to promote and protect their commercial interests. It's interesting now that almost anyone can buy a tube of Dryzone and become a damp 'specialist' without any training whatsoever. The technology really has moved out of 'specialist' hands now and hopefully there are some tough times ahead for the industry that might lead them to change their dubious working practice.

 

[Shytalkz]

That's a good post, JM.

 

[Joe Malone]

Incidently, I agree with Noseall, in my experience the guarantee's aren't worth the paper they're written on, the company will either have gone bust or you'll have the more common occurrence where the company will return to tell you that the reoccurrence of damp is down to some totally unrelated problem. They quite often even have the audacity to specify and charge for further works; again backed up by one of their fantastic guarantees.

 

[joe-90]

When I bought the house I'm living in the wallpaper at the lower half of the walls was hanging off in sheets. The wall looked like a digestive biscuit that had been dunked in tea. It was that visible. When the injecting took place you could actually see little 'beads of perspiration' appear on the brick surface and trickle down the brick face. If that wasn't damp - then what was it?
No problem since - house dry as a bone whereas water used to stream down the windows before.

 

[Shytalkz]

You're missing the point Guiseppe: no one's saying that damp doesn't exist - far from it - just that the damp-proofing industry's supposed panacea of injecting every time is not always the answer. If there is a cause that can be isolated without injecting, then that's the way it should be dealt with. Damp-proofing company approach is invariably totally incorrect, firstly taking only surface readings with a meter, compounded more often than not by needless injection when there is an extraneous influence that can be dealt with to alleviate the problem. That approach is more to do with the money that they can cream off a client, coupled with an intrinsic lack of understanding of building behaviour.

 

[Joe Malone]

Joe; sounds to me like you had a condensation damp problem and more probably that the change in ownership resolved a lot of the occupancy issues that were contributing to the condensation damp problems. You said yourself, water streaming down the windows. This isn't caused by rising damp. Condensation damp will pool at the wall base and mimic rising damp profiles almost exactly. I hate to say it but you probably wasted your money.

 

[jbonding]

"joe i now see it" youve had your pants pulled down by a dampproofing professor and you wont have it

 

[joe-90]

No Joe Malone what used to happen is that the damp would evaporate in the heat of the room and condense on the windows. Injecting a silicon solution into a wall wouldn't stop condensation now would it? So you tell me why the condensation stopped almost overnight if it wasn't as I suggested.