Uncontrollable damp - renting

Hi guys,

The damp in my apartment is really bad in the bedroom and all but uncontrollable as the window doesn't open, it's a metal window frame and a single-glaze window at that. Obviously as it's getting colder it's starting to rain a lot more and even wiping the damp away it returns in a week.

The damp has spread across form the window now to parts of the wall which look to have been previously plastered over (you can see the cracks). The bedroom is noticeably colder and louder than the livingroom/kitchen too - almost as if the window isn't actually installed correctly.

There are also patches in my livingroom/kitchen area around the windows but nowhere near as severe as we can open the window here. Even so, having the window open in the current temperatures isn't ideal by any stretch.

I've reported the damp to my LL but what else can I do or can be done to counter it?

Damp comes from many many places, and if it cant get out and be replaced by warm dry air, will always be a problem.

Washing hanging to dry indoors,,... showers and baths...... loads of wet coats and boots etc...all will create increasing levels of damp which, without warmth and a constant release of moisture to the outdoors will build and build

Opening windows can and will help, on dry days but clearly A) the windows need to open and B) the moisture needs to escape and not be replaced

Single glazed windows are cold, by their nature, and so moisture will condense upon them faster, and if it'd dried off and got rid of... it will HELP lower moisture levels in the room. But that's a constant job, and wiping with a towel that then stays in the building wont help, clearly. The towel just dries into the room, releasing it's moisture again.

I know this sounds excessive, but it's worth considering spending some money on a dehumidifier and emptying it regularly. It will cost purchase price plus electricity, but I have one in a small flat where moisture COULD have been an issue and it's been a godsend. Moreover when the bloke upstairs had a water leak, that dehumidifier helped dry my ceiling out in record time

It is used regularly in winter, when I run a shower or cook on the hob, and the sheer amount of moisture it extracts is astounding


It's not a cure to the problem... it's a removal of the moisture.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....L._SL1500_.jpg

https://www.amazon.co.uk/EcoAir-DC12...s=dehumidifier

that's what I mean.
Then you also need warmth, ie a radiator.

But the dehumidifier creates a little heat and blows dry air out so if you position in against a wall it will help.

as an aside, I once visited a terraced old house in Nottingham which DID have uncontrollable damp.

the bloke who owned it had a permanent moisture issue, and eventually found he had... a basement full of water. A proper cellar, under the main living room... 3 feet deep in water. The door to it had been blocked and the floor boards he walked on, every day, were 6 feet above a lake.

that wouldn't get cured by a small dehumidifier.

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Originally Posted by Zak33

as an aside, I once visited [..] Nottingham

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I try and avoid that where-ever possible ;)

I had a similar problem sometime ago in a rented house, one particularly poorly insulated wall of my room would turn in to a mouldy waterfall during the winter. I complained to the landlady and asked for a dehumidifier, she bought one and I think it was pulling between 1-2L of water a day - for a small 2.5 x 2.2m room! Solved the damp problem though.

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Originally Posted by Zak33

Damp comes from many many places, and if it cant get out and be replaced by warm dry air, will always be a problem...

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Appreciate the post. Already picked up a cheaper/smaller dehumidifier which is drawing about 250ml a day without rain. I don't know anyone with a larger one I could lend to see if going bigger/better would actually work.

In terms of heating we're a bit stuck too as they're crap storage heats which throw out hardly any heat relative to how much they must be costing. The actual heater itself is warm but you can't feel it at all unless you're touching it.

As you mention wiping down with a towel only moves the moisture around and obviously living in a flat, I have to dry my clothes in-doors (in the room with the window.)

I think there is another issue at play in the bedroom specifically because as I mention, it is noticeably colder and we have a plastic windowsill that extends beyond the window and there is a clear damp line above the plastic where the wall/plaster meets it.

I've informed the LL like I say - I'm just paranoid they are somehow going to try and spin it on me (cause and/or cost) rather than have someone come out and re-cover the paint with some sort of damp-resistant paint.

As daft as it sounds put a fan in the room as well to move the air, it really does help. When I put the dehumidifier in the bathroom with the trickle extractor turned off and window shut to give it the best shot at drying the air and raising the room temp (refrigerant type dehumidifiers work best at 30 degrees c) it fills the water tank in 3-4 hours on a fresh wash when it took 8 hours with no fan moving air.
Turn the fan on full what while you are out of the room and let it move the air round to help the dehumidifier.

Tbh you need a working window and by the sounds of it a trickle extractor fan. I fitted one in the bathroom to replace the one that ran for 5 mins after I turn the light out as the damp was a problem, now it isn't as the smart fan ramps up it it detects a lot of humidity, might be worth asking for one as you have to have one to meet new build regs now.


You need at least a 10lt dehumidifier if you are drying indoors, bite the bullet and get the one linked above, you wont regret it. (and a fan as the dehumidifier on it's own won't dry a bad wall unless you move it around all the time)

is there mould in the room?

Do you have any vulnerable occupants (young children/elderly)

If so hello environmental health officer, and an enforcement notice for improvement against your landlord. :)

Bedrooms are worse than other rooms as you give off a lot of moisture too. My other half had a flat where the bedroom was like this and it's a constant battle to deal with.

Try and keep your heating constant instead of on-demand. Temperature fluctuations cause condensation when the air cools. Condensation is what happens when water vapour held in the air cools enough to become solid water droplets. It's usually cold surfaces such as walls or windows that triggers this. So, as above, if your air isn't holding a lot of water then there is less to condense.

I'm not sure how much leeway you have being rented. But other things that can be done is boosting insulation (ultimately, external wall insulation, but that's a big expense). You can get insulating wallpaper that is better than nothing. You can also install secondary-glazing to single-pane glass which helps massively. And at the very minimum you can apply a removable thermal film to the glass which provides marginal gains.

If you get any mould, make sure you kill it, chemically, it's nasty stuff (both mould and the chemicals to kill it).

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Originally Posted by ik9000

... Do you have any vulnerable occupants (young children/elderly)

If so hello environmental health officer, and an enforcement notice for improvement against your landlord. :)

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Don't need vulnerable occupants; it sounds to me like the property doesn't provide adequate heating & ventilation, which are part of the essential requirements in a rented property. Your landlord might get away with claiming the storage heaters are adequate (although it sounds to me like they're not working properly if they're not actually heating the space effectively), but if the landlord doesn't take appropriate measures to try to sort the problem within a few weeks, it might be worth contacting the private housing team of your local authority anyway, just to get some advice and make them aware that you might have an issue.

If you want to stay on good terms with your landlord, why not ask them if they're willing to pay for a couple of space heaters (something like those little halogen ones, which are quite effective/efficient), that they can add to the inventory so they get left in the house when you move out...? Better heating is likely to at least alleviate some of the problem whilst they sort the ventilation out...

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

I've informed the LL like I say - I'm just paranoid they are somehow going to try and spin it on me (cause and/or cost) rather than have someone come out and re-cover the paint with some sort of damp-resistant paint.

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.. walls aren't supposed to get wet and painting them in yacht varnish indoors isn't the solution

who pays the elec?

If it's you, then it's time to ponder the best type of heating.

Im my experience of small rooms, the best sort as called skirting board heaters, and Glen make a superb one that's 500W and works well.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Glen-500-W-...g+board+heater

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

I have to dry my clothes in-doors (in the room with the window.)

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drying clothes indoors is phenomenally bad for YOU. really bad. the moisture levels indoors from clothes drying will, over time, become more newsworthy.

In fact, you need to determine an experiment

Washing and drying in a launderette MAY be cheaper than running a dehumidifier and a big heater all day!

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Originally Posted by Zak33

who pays the elec?

If it's you, then it's time to ponder the best type of heating.

Im my experience of small rooms, the best sort as called skirting board heaters, and Glen make a superb one that's 500W and works well.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Glen-500-W-...g+board+heater

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Argos seem to have the same one for £40 - does that sound about right to you?

My Bedroom is about 12ftx12ft - do you think this will be hot enough to warm it and help alleviate the damp?

How would this compare to those oil based heaters you can get?

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

Argos seem to have the same one for £40 - does that sound about right to you?

My Bedroom is about 12ftx12ft - do you think this will be hot enough to warm it and help alleviate the damp?

How would this compare to those oil based heaters you can get?

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I have tried both and I prefer that little skirting heater, 100%

its v low.... but you must NOT block it

unlike the oil heaters, which are like a radiator, the little skirting heater needs airflow.

yes I think you have a very good chance it will radically help

Ideally, put the heater under your window. Which is the normal placement of radiators. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works. The coldness from the window draws the hot air which creates movement which is very important for getting the rest of the room warm and not just having a warm spot.

Also having warm air next to the window will reduce condensation on the glass.

Yes, you'll lose heat out the window, but that's an insulation problem not an internal heating problem.

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Originally Posted by Dashers

Ideally, put the heater under your window. Which is the normal placement of radiators. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works. The coldness from the window draws the hot air which creates movement which is very important for getting the rest of the room warm and not just having a warm spot.

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exactly right.

cold air falls off the window.. it literally slithers down the glass and slides down the wall .... and hits a warm air rising.. and pushes into the room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr8WbV8F_5g

like that

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

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Originally Posted by me-yeah

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

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That's black mould - not damp. Bleach won't do much against damp. Unless you're into the aroma of swimming pool.

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Originally Posted by me-yeah

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by chinf

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by ik9000

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.

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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.