Old house, the rising damp debate

[Chillyjellytotty]

We have an old house with quite a few damp issues which we have hopefully fixed. Roof/chimneys fixed capped off. The old rotten beams taken out letting the room air out yet it appears there is rising damp on an internal wall. The white pipes are new radiator pipes that feed the radiator in the hallway. The wall underneath does not feel wet, but is covered in tar. The wall the other side does not feel wet, but hard to see as it’s behind a radiator. I have seen so much good advice on here regarding damp old houses please help.
On closer inspection while taking the photos the beam very closest to the wall looks mouldy so we will replace that. Could that be causing the issue

the tar (bitumen) will doubtless have been applied in an attempt to cover up the damp.

You have a source of water.

You need to find out what it is, and correct it (not try to cover it up)

Popular sources, depending on age of house, are:
leaking water pipes
broken drains
earth or paving piled up against ther side of the house
dripping gutters or puddles wetting the base of the wall
condensation due to excess humidity AND insufficient ventilation

very much less common are
streams
high water table
houses built on old ponds

figments of the imagination are:
rising damp

Can you post some photos of the who wall please, inside and out, all the way from gutter to paving, showing all drains, pipes, gullies and manholes

And a plan diagram that includes the position of the outdoor stopcock (usually next to where the front gate used to be when the house was built) and the inside stopcock (usually underneath where the kitchen sink used to be when the house was built).

How old is the house?

update

it looks to me like you have a Victorian house

and the hall floor is tiled concrete

I will wager 50p that the hall runs towards the kitchen at the back of the house

and there is a lead water supply pipe buried in the concrete

and this pipe is over a hundred years old

and full of water under pressure.

Just jumping in to ask (as have similar problem) if that is the issue then is the only solution to dig up and replace the pipe?

the first thing is to verify that's where the pipe is

then to check if it is leaking

A new pipe does not have to follow the same route as the old one. Therefore the old one does not need to be dug up. The new one might go at the side of the house, or, in a house that mostly has suspended wooden floors, it can go under the wooden floors in other rooms.

Thank you so much. I shall hand you your 50p while I get pictures ect. Yes house is late 1800’s the dining room has been plagued with damp. We brought without getting full survey, lots of damp covered up clearly our fault, but annoying. I don’t want to keep patching up. I just want to get it fixed.

We have ripped up the floor in the dining room. The previous owners had redone it in 2014 (shown by newspapers found). When we ripped the floor up they had blocked up the vents (we have unblocked) they had put sheets of plastic down then glued an mdf floor down then covered it in lovely flooring. None of the damp was showing/didn’t smell. My partner has unblocked the vents.

How do you locate the pipes? Is it a detector? Getting a plumber to find the water route?

Sorry about the cat, she loves being in pictures.

locate the stopcocks.

The housebuilder's plumbers are pretty certain to have laid the original pipe in a straight line between them.

When you have found them, locate a young person with sharp hearing. You will need to be able to turn the outside stopcock (by the gate) on and off. If you have a water meter that may make it easier. It may have a T-shaped handle you can turn to put water on and off.

if numbskulls have laid paving or concrete over the stopcock it will be more tiresome.

photos will help.

We have two stop cocks outside (have shown them in the plan) and then one inside by the kitchen sink. Our kitchen utility and downstairs bathroom have been redone since moving. The upstairs bathroom had a shower plumbed in running uphill so the ceiling in the kitchen caved in. And the utility and bathroom were done in the 70’s so needed replacing. The blue car in the 3rd picture is about a foot behind the stop cock. The wall opposite the wet wall I am asking about has been damp since we moved in, had chimney/roof redone. Hoping that has fixed the issue, although we still have ‘salt’ coming through the wall in the living room where I have wrote ‘damp’. The plaster inside the house was stripped back down to brick level, it was wet mud between big stones. Builder advised this wet mud wouldn’t ever dry so it was dug out bit by bit and remortered with Lyme. The wall was then plastered with Lyme. Wall feels dry but a box in the corner went mouldy very quickly.

Hopefully these pictures you are able to get an idea where the stopcocks are not in a straight line, and if they are the water wouldn’t be anywhere near the centre of the house where the leaky wall is. Thanks so much for the help/advice

I have noticed water marks on the wall inside the hall way that mirrors the living room

The paint makes it tricky to see unless you stand at a certain angles. Also the paint is starting to peel. Hopefully it is the water pipe.

well that's a surprise

you have two outdoor stopcocks, neither of them where I expected.

Not sure from the plan where the cat's front door is.

Try turning off the stopcocks one at a time. Possibly one feeds the other, possibly one feeds a garden tap, wash-house or outside WC.

Also, you appear to have a soil pipe and a drain gully beside the cat's front door. Is this by the kitchen, or on the other side?

you can see grass and weeds growing where a cut has been filled in from the gulley. This may indicate a broken drain in the ground. Have you ever seen wild tomato plants?

In the cat's picture, it looks like there is a slope away from the house. Is that right?

You might like to order an engineer's stethoscope When the tip is pressed against a pipe, you hear hear the hiss of escaping water if there is a leak. You will not notice it until someone turns the stopcock off and on, when the noise stops and starts. A young person with sharp hearing it can hear it in a quiet room late at night.

You mention a wet ceiling. This is usually from a bathroom leak above.

yes, the green wall with a watermark does suggest a leak in a concrete floor. A leak close to the wall tends to form a mountain shape, with the highest wet point near to the source. When the entire floor is wet, it tends to form a flatter line or a range of hills. If it is hill shaped the hill may be close to the source, but it might just be different brick absorbency. The mark is quite high so you have quite a lot of water in it.

BTW a dado rail and wainscot used to be a trick to cover a damp wall. Common where a hallway has a stone floor.

I think we live in a similar aged house with similar issues.
Very interesting advice re the possibly leaky pipe.
However the thought of digging up our floor fills me with dread - we're not far above the water table here (village built on reclaimed salt marsh - ha) so I think we're just going to live with it.
Will try the stopcock experiment though, thank you PigletJohn

Yes the cat is sat by the kitchen door. There is a slope away from the house. Have taken a better image to include the floor, the rectangle ‘weed area’ is the manhole cover sewage goes down here towards the main ‘drain/pipe’ which is by the blue car. So our sink is in the kitchen window (window on the right of the picture as you look at it, dining room is on the left by the gate). We think the wet ceiling is because of some old pipes that have now been capped properly. But the weir ceiling is above the window on the left.
I will get an engineers stethoscope on order and a bribe for my son who has amazing hearing.

still pondering the pipe location.

it comes up in the kitchen, then will go to the bathroom upstairs, unless you have two. If, as I think, the hall floor is wet from a leak, I would have expected the pipe to be buried in the floor. An old house might have a disused pipe if later plumbing was done, but it would usually be near the kitchen or downstairs from the bathroom. Sometimes a range or backboiler had piping for hot water. I suppose its possible a leak under the kitchen could soak into the hall floor. Are there other houses of similar design to yours nearby? They might have had a similar problem.

if the kitchen or bathroom is in a later extension, there will be old pipes going to the original location.

Scrape some of that tar/bitumen off and see if the bricks are sodden.

i am assuming it will be clean tapwater. If you can catch enough to put in a bottle, give it a shake. Drain water contains soap and detergent.

Listening to the pipes and operating the stopcock will tell you if there is a leak. An old plumber can also test at the kitchen tap with a glass of water, provided there is no water being used in the house at the time.

Thanks so much just typed a long reply and dd pressed back. I will re read again later.
@Ihaventgottimeforthis it’s a nightmare isn’t it.
I think the dampness actually correlates to rain thinking about it and looking at pictures. When I painted the blue there was no line

Speculation

The first stopcock looks as if it is by the road. Do you think it is connected to the watermain, and then the pipe runs up the side of your house, towards the kitchen/bathroom addition, where there is a secondary stopcock in the ground? which then feeds your indoor stopcock? Turning then on and off one at a time would confirm this.

I presume there is no sign there was ever a stopcock at the road at the front of the house?

The soilpipe and other drains are all at the back of the house, so probably run down your sideway to the road where you will see occasional large thick cast-iron sewer manhole covers (some districts have drains and water in a back alley behind rows of houses)

Is your soilpipe cast iron?

Look at the gullies, and the soilpipe where it enters the ground.

Are there signs of repairs, patching, or cracked and sunken paving, or lush green weeds coming up? Are the gullies dark brown clay (like a teapot) and do any of them look like they have sunk?

rain, mm? I can't see a gutter downpipe nearby. Or a chimney that rain could run down inside.

As you are are on sloping ground, is there a slope that might encourage water to run towards your house? Including from a downpipe or gulley?

now you've got the floors up, keep an eye on the soil or oversite whenever it rains. You might want to include a trapdoor in the new floor.

BTW, you mentioned rot on the joists. You can use a wood preserver (I use a green Cuprinol product containing Propiconazole), and soak the ends. It smells a bit so let it dry outdoors. You can wrap the ends of the joists in DPC (you can buy it by the roll) held in place by copper or stainless roofers nails, which do not rust. This prevents the timber being in contact with damp brickwork. If the old timber is sound enough that a flat-ended screwdriver cannot penetrate, you can paint the product on as a precaution.

p.s.

the two walls marked "damp" on your plan are next to where I speculate the water supply pipe and the drains pass the wall. But bearing in mind the sloping ground, I wouldn't expect a leak here to reach the hall floor. The slope probably runs the other way.

has anything cropped up?

I've been pondering.

I have a mental picture of the solid hall floor being damp, and water being absorbed into the bottom of the wall. But is this right, and where is it coming from?

Have you had any rain, and has it got better or worse? Mark the watermark with pencil dots, it will not show much but you will able to see if you look.

It might be interesting to drill some holes into the walls of the hall floor, below floor level, to see how wet the base is, and if water dribbles out.

A solid floor may have a base filled with packed rubble, which can be very absorbent of water (this is often found under fireplace hearth stones as well, which can be cured by digging out the rubble and supporting the slab on dwarf walls, with a ventilated space beneath).