Is a damp cellar OK?

[Andrew Baker]

Just looking at a house... Is is OK for a cellar to be damp? Obviously it's underground so water is going to get in.. Does it matter? Damp to touch. Paint bubbles off the walls. Plasterboard on ceiling gets black mould if left. Actual drops of water on one wall after it's been raining.

OK, so storing stuff down there will mean it gets damp; paper will wilt; tools might rust. Does it matter to the house? Or, since it's been standing for 60+ years can it be left as-is?

[Sorry if this is a repost.. Can't see the original - doesn't seem to have hit the newsgroup]

[GMM]

It has to depend on the degree of damp but I should think a majority of cellars get damp to some degree, unles they're in newer builds and have been tanked or some such. A number of houses I looked at had sumps in the cellar with pumps to get rid of the water when it rains. My cellar gets slightly damp sometimes when it rains heavily for a while but is generally dry. I wouldn't store anything vulnerable there though. A friend of mine gets knee-deep water when it rains. Both houses have stood for 150 years-ish so it can't really be that much of a problem.

[stuart noble]

Natural order of things. A cellar should dry out in fine weather providing there is adequate ventilation, but continuous damp would ring alarm bells. Just don't imagine it will be in any way useful unless you spend a pile of money having it "tanked"

[The Natural Philosopher]

It all depends if you WANT a damp cellar

It its below DPC it will be damp unless it was designed with an impermeable barrier .

You can retrofit such by using eg DPM and render over, then creating a new interior with insulation inside, if you want 'habitable space'

[chris French]

The mention of mould on the plasterboard does suggest there might not be enough ventilation.

We have a cellar in our house (circa 150 years old), it's a bit damp as expected - you can notice it in the floor especially which gets damper and dries out in response to the weather. It had previously flooded, the previous owners left a pump which they had used when it had flooded a couple of times - but not since we have been here (8 1/2 years). But it has obviously varied over time, we have a copy of the sale particulars from the 1960's which trumpets a DRY CELLAR (quite what that means though ?I don't know, might just means it doesn't flood.)

They did have to have some of the ground floor timbers over the cellar repalced because of rot and said that after that they had removed the doors (there were a couple of doors down there) and made sure that the little window was always left open bit, and the coal hole lid replaced with a ventilated wooden cover to give some through flow of air.

Seems to have been fine since (20-25 years)

[harryagain]

Depends on the age of the house. In days of yore, some cellars were meant to be damp, a form of refrigeration for food storage.

Modern cellars/basements should not be damp. If there is a timber joist ceiling/plasterboard, definitely not, it is a defect. It might be just condensation. It takes expert assessment to determine this

If water/damp is coming through the walls/floor, Expensive to fix. There may be hidden rot/damage. Leave alone unless you are desperate for the place. You need to get some idea of costs before buying, will not be cheap.

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 20 December 2013 10:06 chris French wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Might be worth the OP borrowing a dehumidifyer to guage the seriousness of the problem. Having damp that cannot dry out doesn't always corrolate with a massive influx of water/water vapour.