subject: Rising Damp Treatment Using Exterior Wall Coatings To Protect Your Home [print this page] This is the time of year when the British home is generally susceptible to rising damp. The winter does all sorts of things to the traditional materials of British housing bricks, which are porous, and concrete, which is also porous. Winter makes them swell, contract, fill with ice, thaw, and end up sodden with moisture. Usually that moisture is supposed to run off in the damp course under the house. If the damp course is broken, though, it settles at the foot of the property and starts to rise up through the walls. Rising damp treatment is absolutely necessary in these circumstances: and rising damp diagnoses are necessary throughout, whether you think you have damp in your walls or not. Getting a professional in to check your damp course and your walls is the only way you can be sure that your home is not suddenly going to spring a leak which could cost you your health as well as thousands and thousands of pounds.
When you do not have exterior wall coatings in place to protect your home, you run the risk of getting settled rising damp in there. This internal damp respires into the inside of your house from the walls, causing the air you breathe to become moist, which promotes coughs and colds and lung complaints. As if that was not bad enough, a house that has not had any rising damp treatment is also likely to start growing mould in the corners of its rooms where the respired damp has risen with the warmer air of the house. This mould can exhale seeds and spores at night, which are breathed in by people sleeping in the house. Some species of damp mould can be responsible for long term lung and respiratory problems and are not good for old people, pregnant women or very young children.
Exterior wall coatings help to protect your home, by layering the outside of all your houses surfaces with an impermeable membrane. The membrane breathes from the inside, like skin, so any moisture in the house is let out but moisture from outside, again like skin, cannot pass through the barrier. These coatings are available as a rising damp treatment either in completely clear form, which just sits over your existing decoration, or in coloured render form so the house can effectively be decorated and protected at the same time.
Where houses are definitely suspected of having rising damp problems, you may wish to get a full diagnosis before going ahead with the exterior wall coatings. You will need to use those coatings as a part of a full rising damp solution but serious damp need to be got out completely before those coatings can go on. In fact, in all cases of inquiry it is better to have an expert check your home thoroughly before you embark on a course of rising damp treatment so you know you are treating at the right level for the amount of damp you have.
