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Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
Apex (01-12-2016)
The amount of things that I have just learned from this post alone... lol.
We did have a damp issue but resolved it by getting the building re-roughcasted (was a contributing factor due to the cracks in brickwork/building but the roughcasting was long overdue)
Bedroom had wallpaper stripped, re-plastered, walls coated in anti-damp paint/film, then several coats of paint of white paint. New heaters were bought aswell.
Was a costly job but has since eliminated the dampness in the any of the rooms.
Hm, I thought I'd already posted this...? How odd.
One caveat about heating is that it won't get rid of the damp - it'll just change your apartment from a cold damp one into a warm damp one, which isn't much better
If you can't open the windows you need to talk to your landlord about ventilation - otherwise the house will just get damper and damper, and you'll end up spending all your money on the electric to run both a heater and a dehumidifier (which I reckon could end up costing you as much as a fiver a week...). Damp is a health hazard and he needs to be taking it seriously; the apartment must have some way of getting the damp air out.
Another thing worth checking is the brickwork pointing. If rain is getting into the brick work this will make things a lot worse. Pointing around windowsills are especially prone to flaking away over time.
Economy 7 storage radiators can be pretty good in small places, we had them in our old flat where we lived for 14 years without any problems in the rooms with them. They need to be big enough to heat the room, you still need vents (we had the above window ones), we also had a condensing washer dryer that we used rather than air drying inside. The economy 7 heaters also need to be setup correctly, which can be a pain, they also take a couple of days to adjust to large changes. When we moved out the new place had storage rads but they were wired as standard heaters, we avoided using them and went for oil radiators and convection heaters.
ok a couple of things:
heating can help solve damp IF the problem is due to cold bridging inducing condensation in the walls or on the inner surface. The extra heat can help shift the dew-point away from the inner cavity skin. Solid walls can also benefit, but only if the dew point is sufficiently far from the inner surface that the moisture gradient is not sufficient to penetrate the full wall thickness. However, the comments that heating won't solve the internal dampness for a severe problem is correct, the humidity needs to be removed somewhere too. You might not get surface condensation, but you will end up with humid air and it will become unpleasant very quickly.
Repointing can certainly help, but make sure the pointing is compatible with the underlying masonry and mortar. So much damage is done by putting cement pointing over lime mortar - the wall can't breathe properly, the lime mortar decays to powder and the bricks will blow due to internal salt deposition and freeze-thaw action within the bricks.
Severe damp problems often have multiple contributing causes. A holistic investigation is needed to avoid the proverbial band-aid on a gaping wound. I recall visiting one property where they complained of chronic damp in the ground floor ceiling, and a walk outside showed the upstairs flat had removed a window, dry-lined the inside of the bathroom and left a hole in the outer wall that water was literally pissing through to flood the ceiling of downstairs. They were fixated on whether the plumbing was any good or the roof was flashed properly. Paying for the wonky tiles to be fixed was all well and good, but without some proper brickwork and a lengthy dehumidification of the party floor/ceiling it was never going to solve the problem.
What construction is the property, where are you in the building which aspects are the worst affected rooms on, and have you called the water board to make sure your usage hasn't spiked (indicating a plumbing leak).
I too live in a rented flat with damp problems, which I haven't been able to solve, only mitigate. The flat is a fairly modern build and on the first floor and so you wouldn't expect it to have any problems, but it's built cheaply with a mix of conventional brick cavity & a few timber exterior walls. My south-facing timber walls are very thin - under 15cm from inside wall to exterior timber siding. When outside drops to freezing, the lower corners and some long vertical patches in the middle of the walls drop to 3 degrees C and get condensation on them, suggesting cold bridging problems too.
The first time I noticed damp on the walls, there was a massive patch away from the corner behind a wardrobe. The landlord & management rep thought it was a leak from the roof or wall due to recent rain - and so someone checked for leaks (but found nothing) before the walls were repainted with a damp resistant coating, and I repositioned furniture so the walls were clear for airflow.
Knowing that the usual activities (cooking, cleaning, showering, laundry, breathing!) constantly contribute to interior humidity levels I was careful to open windows & vents for ventilation & heat adequately. I've never had more than a little condensation in the corners of my windows on extremely cold days. With interior RH at 60-65% the damp came back to the same places within a year, so I started using a dehumidifier to see what difference it could make, and I was able to get RH down to 35-40%. Despite this lower humidity, the damp still persisted where the walls got very cold - one particular winter I found ice on wall in the morning!
Now, instead of just leaving that part of the bedroom empty I run a server 24/7 with warm exhaust aimed at one cold corner/side, and an electric heater on a timer at night time and the wall temps have improved just enough to keep condensation down, backing up lk9000's post. Fundamentally in my case it's the construction of the property which is the problem, and not the interior humidity/heat/ventilation levels, nor a water leak.
The skirting board type heaters suggested in this thread look like a good option in the cases where walls are just too cold and adding insulation isn't possible.
I still run my dehumidifier at night in the cooler months as using it means I can lose less heat through opening windows and I can turn down the other heating a little. Running the dehumidifier has made little difference to my electricity bills. I use a 7l desiccant type dehumidifier (Ecoair DD122) and it keeps the whole of my one bedroom flat at ~40% RH just running during Economy 7 hours.
clean it away with some bleech or dettox, and it should stay away for a month or 2, it will probably help if you have a microfibre cloth
That's black mould - not damp. Bleach won't do much against damp. Unless you're into the aroma of swimming pool.
Been there, done that, this only treats the symptoms and not the problem, and over time the damage is not just on the surface but underneath which bleach doesn't help with.
No but if you're renting then quite often you're not at liberty to do the sort of work that would treat the underlying problem so you have to resort to managing the immediate issue which the mould at the surface. But again, that is a slightly different issue than the larger scale damp problem reported by the OP.
Indeed - and that is my point; you can mitigate the surface problem by keeping your interior humidity low and keeping your wall surface temperature as high as you can afford, but even then it sometimes isn't enough to avoid still having damage to the walls, even with regular surface cleaning. In these cases, the only true remedy is to fix the underlying problem, e.g. a leak, unwanted water path from the ground, or in my case inadequately built walls. If you are renting you might be lucky with your landlord, but you often won't be.
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