Sep 2010 It’s the curse of the British home – the one thing guaranteed to write an appalling figure in the deficit column of pretty much every household budget in the country, at one time or another.
Britain, uniquely and famously, builds its houses out of porous materials, in a land where rainwater is not so much a common inconvenience as an incontrovertible fact of life. The British summer alone is legendary for pouring such ludicrous concentrations of rain on the island’s inhabitants, with July and August months (despite annually chirpy predictions to the contrary) often lost under a soaking haze of rainy days. Rising damp, the natural consequence of sharp rises in standing groundwater, attacks houses from the foundation up – and, once it starts, it’s very hard to stop without professional attention.
The damage rising damp can cause is phenomenal. The most obvious, and most dangerous, form of water damage to properties occurs when the materials used to secure the building (either to the ground or, by way of structurally important beams and walls, to itself) are softened and loosened. Water is literally sucked up from the ground by the porous action of the building materials, which then swell, become soft, and distort in ways that directly threaten the structural stability of the house. In the worst cases, rising damp attacking dwellings in this way can cause subsidence, collapsed walls and riven foundations. Not the sort of thing a homeowner in a recession wants to wake up and discover.
Rising damp can also cause plenty of cosmetic deterioration: cracked and peeling render (that’s external finishing, to you and I); visible mould; condensation problems inside the house (which automatically lead to damp air, mouldy walls and destroyed carpets); and flaking masonry. Once the water has gotten in to the solid parts of a house, it inexorably takes them apart, piece by tiny piece, in a fashion so inevitable it’s reminiscent of an attack by plant roots. Each extra drop widens the cracks a little further – until, one day, a wall presents a huge split down its middle or a part of the house slides slightly into its own foundations.
Rising damp, then, is deadly – because it will happen, end it can’t be seen until it’s too late. Even houses with modern damp coursing (designed to run water away from a property) are all too often subject to blockages, which retain the standing water rather than removing it. The results, either way, are costly and sometimes even dangerous.