Two Questions About Damp...

[iggymoxon]

Sorry to bring this topic up again but... two quesions:

1. We have some damp under the window cill in an upstairs bedroom. We do not know what is causing it. From inspecting the outside window and cill, everything looks OK. Our house is victorian, solid walls, wood sash windows, stone lintel cill (which has been painted at some point). The windows are modern handmade replacement sashes. We have had some water coming in at this window occasionally (when the wind is in a particular direction and the rain is heavy). Again, we're not sure how it gets in, but it seems to get in at a highish level and run/drip down onto the cill inside. Ref the damp under the cill, my thoughts are that perhaps this has in part been caused by the rain coming in occasionally but I'm not sure if this is the complete story. Any ideas/advice?

2. After some very high winds and a bit of rain, we have suddenly noticed a damp patch near the ceiling in the attic bedroom. It is on the chimney breast. Again we've inspected the chimney as far as we can, but everything seems fine. Could some freak weather have caused rain to get into the chimney and cause this damp patch? We have just decorated this room and we are sure it wasnt there before! Sadly, there is no access into the roof space, so we cant inspect it internally.

 

[Penners]

1. There are so many possible causes for damp under your window sill that it's difficult to know where to begin. However, here are a few thoughts:

The outside sill should have a drip groove or drip bar on its underside, hopefully an inch or more out from the wall. The idea of this is the water drips off the sill at this point, rather than creeping horizontally into any hairline cracks between the sill and the wall below.

Your comment about water coming in at the window in certain wind conditions could be significant. If the wind is blowing rain through gaps in the window, then it will also be blowing it into any other available gaps. Is the window properly sealed into its reveal outside? If there were any dodgy areas of sealing anywhere around it, the water could penetrate there and run down to the bottom inside the wall.

If you're getting standing water on the inside sill from time to time, do you know how that sill is sealed to the window frame? There should be a tongue on the back edge of the sill that fits into a groove on inside face of the bottom of the window frame. However, if the sill is simply butted up against the window frame, it's possible that water on the sill is permeating down between the back edge of the sill and the window frame.

2. A damp patch on a chimney breast near the ceiling of an attic bedroom could be due to a failure of the flashing around the chimney stack, where it emerges from the roof. Such failures can often be quite difficult to find, and can't normally be spotted without going up on the roof (although it's worth having a good look through binoculars first).

It is, however, possible that the water is permeating through from inside the chimney. Is the chimney in use for fires or as a flue, or is it redundant?

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Re the chimney. I had something similar in a previous house. There was a slight crack in the render on the outside face of the chimney which resulted in a damp patch on the inside wall. I painted some of that horrible waterproof paint over the crack and the damp patch dried out.

It may be worth checking - seems more plausible than the gravity-defying rain theory!

 

[Penners]

seems more plausible than the gravity-defying rain theory!

Gravity-defying? Eh? Our chimney points upwards - doesn't yours? :wink:

 

[iggymoxon]

Thanks for the replies. Re the window - I am suspicious of the sealant around the exterior. I think this is where water is possibly getting in. I've inspected using binoculars and there does seem to be an area right at the top that looks as if it has cracked, but without getting someone up a ladder to do a proper inspection, it's impossible to tell. My OH isnt keen on getting up the ladder (dodgy knees) and I'm not keen either! We will be getting the windows repainted in the summer so perhaps that will be a good time to inspect it.

Re the chimney breast - the damp patch looks as though it is already drying out. Again, it's impossible to tell whether all is structurally well up there without someone getting up there on a ladder (ours is too short).

 

[Schoolmarm]

What about opening the modern hand made sash and poking your head out to look?

 

[Penners]

What about opening the modern hand made sash and poking your head out to look?

You see? There's occasionally someone who has the ability to come up with a radical new approach, that gets right the nub of the problem.

Ladders? Binoculars? Electron microscopes? Or open the window and have a look! :wink:

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Gravity-defying? Eh? Our chimney points upwards - doesn't yours? :wink:

Ah yes, but if the rain is falling vertically enough to enter the chimney, it's then got to veer off to one side or t'other in significant enough quantities to make the bedroom wall damp. For my money, that's pretty special rain!

 

[Penners]

if the rain is falling vertically enough to enter the chimney

I reckon rain would have to travelling completely horizontally* not to enter a chimney!


*Like frequently it does here

 

[AMc]

Video cameras, digital cameras and camera phones are all good ways of looking at inaccessible bits of the your house. It's much safer to dangle a video camera out of the window pointing up at the cill than to lean out yourself.
I've stuck my camera phone under the floor boards and into the edges of the roof space when it would have been very difficult to get a proper look myself.

Avoid sticking cameras with lenses that wind out from the body into dusty places as particles of dust can get into the mechanism and ruin them - as I learned to my considerable financial cost.

 

[Mark]

I use a clear plastic bag and an adapted clear plastic bottle for my webcam adventures.

Combined with the chimney brush poles I can get the camera almost anywhere.

 

[Ian Bond]

I use a clear plastic bag and an adapted clear plastic bottle for my webcam adventures.

Combined with the chimney brush poles I can get the camera almost anywhere.

Crikey! Is that for one of those 'specialist' sites on t'internet that I've heard tell of, Mark? :shock:

 

[Nemesis]

It's been making my imagination work overtime since I read it, I have to say...

 

[Gervase]

:shock: