To cure rising damp at a late stage, you first need to dry the house that has been affected. It’s all very well proofing the vulnerable areas of a house against water, after all: but if those areas are already saturated, all the proofing compound will do is hold the existing water inside the walls. Which, eventually, would result in a collapsed wall. A house badly afflicted by rising damp must be professionally dried (a process that usually involves industrial heaters, and in extreme cases can even necessitate moving residents out until work is complete) and reinforced. A person attempting to cure rising damp at this late stage, without professional help, is asking not just for trouble (not to mention failure) – but for his or her house to fall down.
Once the home is dry, and the damaged materials have been replaced or reinforced, the external parts of the house must be proofed against further water incursion. This is the stage at which the prevention or cure of rising damp becomes universal. Every home in the UK should be protected against groundwater – to prevent rising damp, of course, is to cure rising damp – using one or both of a pair of simple precautions.
The first precaution, which should be standard in all modern dwellings, is damp coursing. Damp coursing is basically an irrigation trench that runs groundwater away from the foundation and walls of a house to a place where it can’t do any damage. It isn’t foolproof, mind – groundwater comes with an associated mess of debris and detritus, which will eventually clog the damp course to such an extent that it stops working. One of the best ways to cure rising damp is to have damp coursing annually inspected and cleaned: an operation that can be performed in a day and could save thousands of pounds against expensive repairs in the long run.
The second precaution is external treatment. Older dwellings don’t have damp coursing, and so should be treated yearly without fail: for modern dwellings, the treatment of external surfaces with a water resistant preparation will act as good backup for the damp course. Modern water proofing for outside walls comes in an array of finishes, from clear through to coloured and textured – which means that all homes can use them to cure rising damp without changing their appearance at all.