• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Damp and Mold .. open thread

T

Tusses

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Coming up to another winter.
Our 1800 house is terrible for damp and mold.

So wondered who else has the problem and how do you cope with it, or how did you solve it ?

I'll be going from room to room, inside and out and seeing what I can do.

For now, I've just put the title and started the thread, as I've been meaning to ask for ages ! lol
 
It would possibly be a good idea for instalment one to describe as precisely as possible the construction from foundations up of your house. Including any extensions and how they have been built.

How is surface water dealt with on the property.

I believe that you are beside a canal or other waterway and maybe that is giving an artificially high water table.

What happens if you dig a sizeable hole outside. Does it fill with water? If not and you chuck a bucket of water in the hole does it percolate away?

Bob
 
yep, gonna start like that Bob .. oh , and yes, if I dig a hole about 18" deep, it has water in the bottom :shock:

Plus, the previous owners blocked up all the air bricks, and rendered over the damp course injection holes ..
Will detail when I get a chance :-)

Ta
 
There's a starter for you. Unblock those airholes and remove the render if any is bridging DPC's. Ventilation? Condensation from you, cooking, washing etc on the internal surfaces will give the impression of damp coming through the walls.

What are the walls made of? If stone or brick and being an old property then chances are that they used lime mortar. I would hack off all that cement render ASAP and let the building breath again. If they have repointed with cement then hack all that out with a mortar rake and apply hairy lime mortar.
 
I have absolutely no professional expertise or experience, but in the 50s and 60s when we were kids, there was no central heating and mainly fossil fuels burnt within the house (wood, coal, coke, paraffin). So everything else being equal, we generated all the internal damp through heating, washing, cooking and breathing!

So, we had frosty patterns on the windows in the mornings in winter. We were made by our parents to open windows and to 'air' the house.

Since then, we have had developments in central heating and double glazing and draught excluding to the extent that we trap the moist air in our houses these days which is one cause of damp and mould.

For my part, whenever, Mrs J dries the washing inside the house, we have windows open everywhere. After a shower, (now I've fully insulated the bathroom), I leave the bathroom window and one other upstairs window so there is a passage of air to take the moist air out.

Friends, relatives and colleagues with similar modernish houses who don't take these precautions appear to end up with the symptoms of damp.
 
My house was built in the 70's - brick with cavities filled and double glazed (wood frames).
Bathroom and shower rooms fitted with extractors. Kitchen hob has extractor too and washing dried in winter using extracted tumble dryer.
We don't suffer with damp and mould.

Rod
 
Gents,

This is exactly why I suggested that Rich post a detailed description of his house construction first to save us firing off in also sort of direction that may or may not be relevant to his particular situation.

Moan over

Bob
 
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