What Causes Rising Damp and Wet Rot?
Rising Damp in Action
When drainage or hydrostatic ground water pressure comes to bear against the walls and floor of your cellar, it can rise up and penetrate the wall in a capillary action, this is called rising damp. If the moisture penetrates vulnerable materials or finishes, particularly in the occupied parts of a building, most commonly at the wall and floor joints, it can cause wet rot and cause your cellar to become not only damp and flooded, but structurally unsound.
Trace Basement Systems provides cellar damp proofing throughout the Midlands, North East England, North West England, Yorkshire and the Humber and into Greater London. We service the urban areas of Manchester, Sunderland, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Nottingham as well as cities and towns inbetween.
What Causes Rising Damp?
When a property with a cellar is constructed, a hole in the ground must be excavated, in which the cellar is formed. Once complete, soil is backfilled around the building.
Digging the soil up and then backfilling it breaks it up, leaving it loose in comparison to the denser virgin soil which remained undisturbed around it.
The result is a 'bowl' of denser soil with a property within it surrounded by the loose backfilled soil.
Rainfall can then percolate in to the looser backfill, and build up between the walls and denser soil, asserting hydrostatic pressure against the walls.
A common feature is the inclusion of a land drain, which collects water at the point where it builds up at the bottom of the 'bowl', causing it to drain safely away before pressuring into the basement. The limitation of this is technique is that this system sits within the soil and can therefore clog over time as silt is washed through the drainage pipe. Many land drains are installed without provision of means for cleaning them out, so that eventually, once dry basements become susceptible to flooding.
This photo illustrates silting with external drainage systems.
How to Stop Rising Damp?
To stop rising damp, a homeowner can damp proof their basement or waterproof it. Damp Proofing is the process of applying a damp proof course along the basement walls to prevent the damp from rising. This method doesn't remove the moisture problem, it merely stops it from rising from the ground up. Damp doesn't just come from the ground, it also seeps in through the basement walls. To ensure your basement will stay dry all the time, a Basement Waterproofing method should be applied. Basement waterproofing eliminates rising damp. It tackles it from all angles. Learn more about basement waterproofing.
