Tudor Brick Problem

[catweazle]

Hi All,

What would be the best thing to protect the brick plinth on my cottage. It fronts the road and I am worried that the salt put down in the winter will eat away at them. They were covered with cement render, causing a lot of damp inside. This we have removed and they have dried out nicely. They have in the past been coated with a kind of coal tar substance. Whatever I use must obviously allow the bricks and mortar to breathe. There seem to be quite a few different products on the market that say they keep water out yet are breathable, but I am a little sceptical about using 'new', unproven over time, products. The bricks are much too pretty to lime mortar over, which was one idea put to me!

Any suggestions please?

 

[MdB]

Does salt eat brick? I've no knowledge on this at all but I can't imagine it being that harmful. I would have thought that damp + frost would be the biggest danger.

 

[catweazle]

Salt can be absorbed into the brick surface and the mortar and I imagine can have a similar effect to frost. I have been told it is bad news anyway.

 

[JoceAndChris]

I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your question but I have a feeling that if you were to contact Womersleys (www.womersleys.co.uk) they would be able to advise you with some suitable, breathable product.

(I have no personal connection with the company but most on here would concur they sell good stuff)

The brick sealant they advised me to buy cost £100 a can however. And whilst they promised it would be fully breathable, I remained a bit doubtful that it would be suitable for my situation, so I didn't buy it.

How much space is there between yourself and the road? Is there any screening possible to protect your house from this road?

 

[Flyfisher]

If salt itself is a problem for brickwork, how do seaside properties deal with it?

Salt damage (if it exists - I don't know) and frost damage would surely be completely different phenomena; one chemical the other purely physical.

 

[catweazle]

Hi,

I have been told that salt can cause problems with brickwork and lime renders etc. I can only imagine that the salt dissolves on contact with the road, gets splashed onto the fabric of buildings, soaks in, then re-forms into crystal, or something like that.

There is no space between my property and the road, in fact my front facade is apparently also the property boundary. There is only about two or three feet between the bricks and passing traffic! I take my life in my hands just to clean the windows!

 

[Gareth Hughes]

Hi,

I have been told that salt can cause problems with brickwork and lime renders etc. I can only imagine that the salt dissolves on contact with the road, gets splashed onto the fabric of buildings, soaks in, then re-forms into crystal, or something like that.

That's a possible mechanism (one that is mentioned by John Ashurst in "Conservation of Ruins"), however don't necessarily confuse "salt" (road salt, sodium chloride), splashed onto the surface of brickwork and (usually) drying off fairly quickly, with "salts" (various chemical compounds found in the bricks themselves, in the mortar, in the run-off from other materials etc.) crystallising inside the bricks and causing the bricks to spall.

http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/risingdamp/risingdamp.htm

moisture will dissolve soluble salts from the building materials such as calcium sulphate, and may also carry soluble salts from its source. If the moisture evaporates through a permeable surface, these salts will be left behind and form deposits on or within the evaporative surface. Where there is a large evaporative surface, salt crystals are deposited as a harmless flour-like dusting on the surface. If evaporation is restricted to localised areas such as defects in an impermeable paint finish, then salt deposition is concentrated, forming thick crystalline deposits with the appearance of small flowers; hence the term 'efflorescence'. When evaporation occurs within the material, salts can be deposited within the pores. The expanding salt crystals in these locations may result in fractures forming in the material and spalling of the surface. This type of decay may be seen in porous brickwork or masonry.

 

[robgil]

if you felt you needed to put a protective barrier between the bricks and the road why not lime render them?

 

[JoceAndChris]

Because catweazle likes the look of naked bricks.

If it was my house I'd just wait and see. How often do roads get salted? It might not be as bad as you think. I'd monitor it every month of winter, taking photos so my imagination didn't get carried away. If I saw that cracking etc had occured then I think it really would be time to start seeing beauty in a lime rendered surface.

My bricks are crumbling away too.

 

[Penners]

I agree with Joce. If it came to a choice between liking the look of naked bricks - which are being damaged due to their nudity - or swallowing my aesthetic preferences and safeguarding my home, I know which I'd choose.

 

[chuckey]

Its Tudor?, Councils have salted the roads for 50 years? St Astier publicity material says that sea walls are built with Lime mortar. Unless you can actually point to some damage caused by road salt, I would not worry about it.
Frank

 

[biffvernon]

You might consider silicate paint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicate_mineral_paint

http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/vapour/vapour.htm

 

[Cloudscape]

Have the plinth bricks yet experienced a winter in their exposed state? It sounds as though they have been covered for quite some time. I would have thought that frost was a potential enemy, if the bricks are delicate. What kind of road is it - A, B, C or what? What's the local council like for salting and gritting? Our local B road only gets gritted in extreme weather, and we have to do a lot of the in-between gritting ourselves. I would have thought that the salting/gritting period was quite brief, compared to the whole year. This'll sound daft, but could you rig up some kind of temporary protection for the plinth in salty periods? We don't know how long a run of plinth you're trying to protect.

 

[catweazle]

Sorry folks, been a bit slack !! (Busy plastering).
Didn't realise I had other posts!
Yes of course the preservation of the brickwork is paramount, and actually they are 17th century bricks, though the chimney stack is of Tudor brick. I think the plinth was built/replaced at the same time as the small hall was floored over in the 1600's. I will monitor the situation and take it from there, but at the moment I like the look of the brickwork. The road is a B road, but is quite busy with haulage and tractors, so would be salted I would think.
The actual building is probably late medieval, at the latest Tudor, but as you can imagine has had a few major restorations. We think there may be timbers from Kenninghall Palace, (visited by Lizzy the 1st, lived in by Mary QS, and destroyed in the 1500's,) used in it's building/and, or restoration.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

As it sounds as if you are in Norfolk, you may find this map of gritted routes in the county useful in establishing whether road salt could be a problem:

http://www.norfolk.gov.uk/consumption/groups/public/documents/article/ncc048987.pdf

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Not sure how close you are to the road, but I have seen plenty of stone buildings (often sand-stone) round here close to the road, where the lowest 18 inches are badly erpoded away - i always assumed from the effect of water splashing from the road as vehicles pass.

If this splashing from wet roads is likely, then I think you may find physical erosion is a bigger problem than salt. Bricks may be "hardier" than sandstone, but I doubt that much hardier.

 

[Moo]

I'll second that, from recent experience.
A sopping wet wall (inside, top floor) revealed that the old bricks outside had been subjected to years and years of water gushing from a badly fixed gutter. They looked like miniature Henry Moore sculptures.