Rising damp quote

[noseall]

The DPC has probably been bridged.

Or forsaken.

 

[tell80]

OP, youve been taken for a ride by paying for a dpc report by a dpc contractor. The surveyor, presumably the home inspector, who advised you is possibly getting a back hander from the dpc co. thats how it works.
There are independent paid dpc surveyors, not many but they are out there.

The dpc co. by asking you to get a landscaper then if anything goes bad with their work they can blame you and your landscaper. Any builder or diyer can lower that backyard, no need for landscapers.
You with a few trades or using a local builder could do that work, inside or outside.
Whoever came out and did the dpc survey was probly a sales person not a contractor. Read the stories below.

Theres lots of free damp and timber surveyors advertised most place. a lot of them might be rubbish but they are free.
No such thing as good reviews on those paid for sites, the reviews are all fake. You possibly used a paid for trades kind of site.

nothing to stop you from buying the place maybe you get a price dropbased on the report.

 

[mrrusty]

Read this https://www.heritage-house.org/. When we inherited our 1902 house it was wringing wet 1m up the walls. Old fella lived in one room with a coal fire every day. When I say wringing, I mean absolutely soaking. Stripped to bare brick, it all dried out. No leaks, no rising damp. It was all condensation.

Now internally insulated, with a new floor with insulation, and dry as a bone apart from a bit of salt poisoning around the fireplace causing a little efflorescence from hygroscopic salts, and we have that under control.

Apart from new floor with dpm and insulation we have done no damp correction work at all. 100% no "rising" damp. Our house experience agrees with heritage house - it doesn't exist.

 

[JohnD]

Although the writer is convinced that damp at the foot of walls was condensation, it may still have been coming from the ground.

When a wall is stripped back to brick, water can evaporate from the surface.

At the height where water loss by evaporation equals or exceeds water gain by capillary action, the wall will become dry. With a well-ventilated subfloor void, evaporation will also help dry the brickwork below the floor. Opening up and ventilating the rooms and fireplaces also improves evaporation.

Clean, unplastered brickwork is resistant to capillarity due to the difference in pore size at the junction between brick and mortar at every bed. So stripping off the plaster also reduces water movement. It may also restore the DPC to working order if it had been bridged.

I am very keen on removing plaster behind skirting to obstruct capillarity.