Rising damp is the number one destroyer of homes and buildings in the UK. Our weather, combined with the porous nature of our building materials, means that rising damp problems are likely to affect every single homeowner at one time or another. Simply put, the UK gets too much rain for its houses.
The effect of all that rain isn’t just damaging to the properties, either. Damp associated blemishes and even structural inadequacies are only hurting bricks, after all: whereas the illnesses that can be cause by prolonged exposure to damp buildings are hurting, and even killing, the people one loves – one’s family; one’s children; even oneself. These are the worst kinds of rising damp problems – pulmonary infections caused by bacteria and algae; intense chills caught as a result of sleeping in damp beds.
Rising damp is slow – as slow, sometimes, as tree roots – which makes it hard to notice. People can sleep for years in beds that are actually covered with a film of moisture, vented from saturated walls (and filled with all sorts of unpleasant bacilli) – and simply think their bed is cold. They don’t necessarily put two and two together even when they get pneumonia – which, they think, is the result of sleeping in a cold bed all those years. It isn’t. Pneumonia, one of the worst rising damp problems to hit humans directly, is in this case the result of sleeping for years in a wet bed.
Obviously, then, from the perspectives both of individual health (would you want your baby sleeping in a nursery filled with wet air?) and building integrity – no-one, I am sure, wishes that their house would fall down – rising damp problems need to be tackled effectively and for good. By for good, we mean not just drying the house or buying a dehumidifier, but having the place professionally cleaned out and damp-proofed. Lucky homeowners (i.e. those for whom the problems associated with rising damp have not yet arisen) can safely damp proof their houses with professionally applied external preparations, annual damp course inspections and good heating practices. The poor folk, on the other hand, for whom the symptoms of rising damp are already a reality – mould, condensation, musty odours, cracked or peeling walls – need to take a tougher approach. Rising damp problems already manifesting require a thorough overhaul of the living space: a professional evaluation of the extent of the damage, competent repair and the instigation of a preventive regime.