• 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!

Name the date - 15%, dry enough to paint

W

Windows

Old Oak
Joined
Jan 25, 2022
Messages
1,299
Reaction score
328
Location
Cumbria & West Kent
The bottom of the left vertical of a fixed casement window in our bathroom (looks to be a 2 x 2 about a metre long, probably pine) has been taking on water unbeknownst to us, presumably from condensation on the window. During prep for painting it became apparent it was very wet, so I removed the existing paint and I’m running a dehumidifier in there set to 40% (the lowest setting).

When I first revealed the wood last week, light pressure would press liquid water out of the fibres. It’s had 3 days of air drying, 3 days of dehumidification for 16 hours a day, and now it’s getting 24 hours a day continuous dehumidification. There’s currently no liquid water after pressure and the surface feels slightly cold rather than wet. A tiny Draper moisture meter says that it is 26% at the bottom of the wood and 21% at 4 inches above that. There is no rot in this wood.

I invite all contestants to guess the date at which the wood will be dry enough to paint as determined by the moisture meter reading 15%. The prize will be your own satisfaction and the respect of your community.

What do you think?
 
25% today so within the margin of error of “hasn’t dried out at all”, but perhaps it’s moving in the right direction. The annoying thing is that I’ve recently rescued some wood that’s been lying in the dirt outside for 3 years and it’s only at 18%.
 
Curious, do you pull/close the curtains at night. If so you will always have condensation, also if you are in a hurry point a fan towards the window.
Don't mind me , I just woke up. :giggle:
 
Im dubious about moisture meters after seeing a consumer progamme on Tv exposing the damp proofing industry.
They had a thermalite block on the bench and another in a tank of water.
Same reading.....
 
duke said:
Curious, do you pull/close the curtains at night. If so you will always have condensation, also if you are in a hurry point a fan towards the window.
Don't mind me , I just woke up. :giggle:
Click to expand...
It normally has a blind in front of the window, but not currently. If we turn off the dehumidifier, it’ll get condensation regardless, but while I’m trying to dry things out with the dehumidifier, the air in that room is too dry to leave anything on the windows. My hope is to dry it out enough that I can putty and paint to close off the ends and stop the condensation pooling in that corner and reaching the wood. When I eventually do secondary glazing for that window hopefully it’ll reduce the condensation, but until then condensation is a fact of life there.

Good idea with the fan. Got some air movement from the dehumidifier, but fan would improve things.
 
Last edited:
fuse said:
Im dubious about moisture meters after seeing a consumer progamme on Tv exposing the damp proofing industry.
They had a thermalite block on the bench and another in a tank of water.
Same reading.....
Click to expand...
Sounds like the meter was fixed?

I’m using this one:

www.drapertools.com

Moisture Meter

Established in 1919, Draper Tools is a supplier of quality trade, professional and diy tools. Check out the massive range of tools available from one supplier.
www.drapertools.com www.drapertools.com

I don’t treat the numbers as very precise, but they do seem to correspond roughly to other evidence of moisture on the materials I’ve tested.
 
fuse said:
Im dubious about moisture meters after seeing a consumer progamme on Tv exposing the damp proofing industry.
Click to expand...
They work well enough for what they're designed to do, which is measuring moisture content of untreated timber. The damp proofing industry mis-using them on completely unrelated materials for which they have no chance of ever working is definitely a problem, and if you ever see someone sticking a moisture meter into a plastered wall you should absolutely doubt what they're saying, but it doesn't mean they don't work on wood.

The tools that do a great job cutting wood are also incapable of cutting concrete; it's the same principle here.
 
Working on a project earlier this year my client was worried about possible damp in his 18th century cottage and especially around and behind the electrical sockets, he convinced himself to buy one these meters, he rang me in a panic as the reading was off the scale, so on further investigation and he showing me what and where he had tested, it turns out he was probing on the back of the steel electrical back box.
 
That Draper meter specifically mentions plaster (it has 2 modes). I’ve even used it for plaster. Had a tiny bit of mould in the corner of an infrequently used room and I checked the reading to distinguish a condensation cool spot vs a leak. Reading was high enough to suggest a leak which I found and fixed.

Damp proofers have been met with suspicion for decades (rightly IMO). My mum warned me against them back in the ‘80s. Did Shakespeare ever warn against the dampe proofering scoundrel?
 
Looks like the 2026 predictions are going to be too pessimistic and even “Trouble on Christmas Eve” is in danger of getting cancelled: the current reading is 17%.

So it went from 26% on the 7th to 17% on the 15th and it seems like the drying out is speeding up.

Probably a better measure of progress would have been distance from bottom that was at X%.
 
Last edited:
I expect Storm Claudia might take the reading upwards again.
 
Windows said:
Looks like the 2026 predictions are going to be too pessimistic and even “Trouble on Christmas Eve” is in danger of getting cancelled: the current reading is 17%.

So it went from 26% on the 7th to 17% on the 15th and it seems like the drying out is speeding up.

Probably a better measure of progress would have been distance from bottom that was at X%.
Click to expand...
Good thing I didn't place a bet :giggle:
 
The final result is that it took from Nov 7th to Nov 22nd to go from 26% to 15% according to the Draper moisture meter (with near constant dehumidification).

If I hadn’t had the meter, I probably would have painted the wood several days ago around the time that it dipped below 17% on the meter since the wood felt very dry to me at that point.

Looks like Duke is the winner! Congratulations!

Honourable mentions to Mike and Andy whose dates in 2026 would surely have been right without the dehumidifier working overtime.
 
An interesting side effect of running the dehumidifier in the bathroom for 2 weeks straight is that the air in the hallway outside the bathroom feels completely different even now. The bathroom used to be an outbuilding and the internal walls of the hallway used to be the external walls of the house and outbuilding. Is it possible that the sandstone walls were still holding enough moisture from when they were external walls 6 years earlier that the extra dehumidification made a permanent difference or will the change revert gradually? Only time will tell I guess, but over a month later, we can still feel the difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top