How to Spot Rising Damp

One of the easiest ways to spot rising damp is to look out for flaking, blistering or powdery pain. Paint needs a dry surface to adhere to but damp works against this. As your porous masonry walls absorbs water out of the ground, the walls become drenched with liquid, salts and minerals. This damp interferes with the surface the paint is trying to adhere to, causing major damage to the aesthetic quality of your walls.

Deep down in the foundations of your home, the moisture that your porous masonry has drawn from the ground has nowhere to escape. As a result of being unable to dry up, the base of both your interior and exterior walls may have developed a dark green or even black mould. If you spot mould localised around the base of your interior walls, the likelihood of rising damp is high.

If your walls are showing yellow, wavy, tide-like stains, it’s likely you have a damp issue. When porous masonry soaks up water, it draws salts and minerals out of the ground too. The wavy stains indicate that some of the moisture has had a chance to dry a little. The yellow, tide-like stains are the salts and minerals left behind. But don’t be fooled. Your porous masonry will still be soaked through and damaged on the inside.

One of the simplest ways to spot rising damp is to look for structural damage to your walls. Having drawn water out of the ground, your masonry has trapped salts and minerals. Under varying weather conditions over time, the salts and minerals expand and try to work their way out of the masonry. This causes it to disintegrate into dust from the inside out. The salts and minerals also eat away at the mortar joins between bricks turning your home’s walls into a crumbling mess.

As capillaries in the porous masonry suck more and more moisture out of the ground, it becomes heavily loaded. This turns your masonry into a hotbed for bacteria. Mould and thousands of other microorganisms flourish in environments such as these. They bring about allergies and asthma which can result in wheezing, coughing, tightness of the chest and shortness of breath.