Damp walls; are Rentokil the only way?

No, you fix battens to the timber/brick/stone/SomethingThatIsStrongEnough and then hang things off the battens

Typical DIY'ers!

We don't have stone here in sunny Suffolk so I'm not at all up on this one. If you don't get a reply here then your best bet is to ask on

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Pity cos when they have to use it they end up being very enthusiastic. Its nice stuff to use. Maybe you should offer to send a likely plasterer on a one day 'Lime plastering for plasterers' course. There is bound to be one near you sometime

Anna

~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Lime plaster repairs / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|

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01359 230642

Reply to
Anna Kettle
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No plaster is strong enough for fixings. You go through that into the brick behind.

Old houses didn't use rawlplugs - they're too recent an invention. The common way to fix to a brick wall was to hammer wood wedges between bricks and fix to them. If those do come loose, you're left with a pretty large hole. With a light fitting to lath and plaster ceiling, the correct way is to fit a batten between the joists, and fix to that.

What you're describing is not a problem with the material, but a lack of decent workmanship.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Reply to
stuart noble

In article , "stuart noble" re-point to 1" depth and hope the bricks themselves weren't too porous. IME

That's too deep. Repointing is putting on a new exposed surface, not rebuilding a wall whilst it's standing (which it might not be if you rake out too much). Normally, 1/4" is the amount it's safe to rake out.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

In article , stuart noble Dampness was accepted, along with a lot of other inconveniences that we

I don't think so. Wallpaper was common much before this, and it will soon fall off in damp conditions - then as now.

Houses heated by open fires are by nature well ventilated. Remove the ventilation and all sorts of problems occur.

Your treatment attempts to deal with 'rising' damp. The general view these days is that *genuine* rising damp is actually rare, and that most who recommend treatment for similar symptoms - even if they do exist - are more likely to be profit motivated.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Rawlplugs go back to the '20s, AFAIK. Of course, those were the fibrous ones.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Yup. However, I'm not sure how long it took for them to come into general use on new builds. I've worked on '30s houses with the 'wedge between bricks' method.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Does it?

I've never believed in it in brick built houses and, if it does exist, it's likely to be combined with penetrating damp. Fact is I don't really care where it's coming from. The wall is damp and you want to stop that penetrating to the inside so you put a barrier there which prevents water coming in but allows water vapour to escape. Easy to do, no drying time, and leaves you a good finish to decorate.

Reply to
stuart noble

Grunff

Could you please expand a bit on what adequately ventilating and adequately heating actually involved i.e. what the situation was when you started and what changes you made ?

Thanks

Reply to
TRK's dad

Google scores again - first invented c.1919

"Tuesday, January 30, 2001 :

Rawlplug, which makes wall-fixings, was today snapped up by plaster and plasterboard supplier BPB for £27m. ...

The 82-year old plug was invented by builder John Rawlings and is used after drilling to fix anything from shelving to pictures to walls.

It was originally made out of jute, bonded with animal blood, but was replaced with plastic in the 1960s."

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'm of an age to remember the Rawlplug tool: a sort of masonry drill in a metal handle that you hammered and rotated to make the hole. No wonder they had to have big mental asylums in those days!

Reply to
Tony Bryer

I still have several, although they belong to my father. He used them to install central heating around 1960, so they are for 1/2", 3/4", and 1 1/4" pipe holes.

I used an SDS drill to install mine, although I used them a number of times before I bought an SDS drill.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

I've still got a couple. But the big local asylum is now houses.;-)

They were actually quite quick into normal brick etc once you got the hang. And would also work - but slowly - into much harder materials. Only the advent of the SDS drill finally put mine to bed. A hammer drill and masonry bit couldn't do everything a Rawltool could.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

IME

On most of the walls I've worked on round here you can rake out 1" with your finger, and 1/4" of mortar perched on top of something that unstable would be purely cosmetic. The entire front of my 1900 lime mortar brick built house was done to an inch with cement/pva mortar 10+ years ago (up to 4" deep in places where the Victorian bodgers must have run out of mud). Since then, no cracks, no spalling and, more important, no damp. I should also mention that the original mortar here was heavily dosed with brick dust, the poor man's pozzolan. It seems to me that if you make lime set in this way, you're going to lose the self-healing properties attributed to it. Can't have it both ways I guess.

Reply to
stuart noble

Sure!

Heating: No CH, some electric heaters and two open fires. Replaced with CH, UFH in kitchen and one wood burner.

Ventilation: Many of the room vents were blocled up. We cleared those, so there are 2 vents on the ground floor and two on the first floor.

Water ingress: Guttering was replaced, and outside render patched.

The house was really very, very damp when we moved in. I suspect the heating and fixing the gutters were the most important fixes.

Reply to
Grunff

In article , stuart noble it's likely to be combined with penetrating damp. Fact is I don't really

Assuming the original plaster is ok, it's simply adding considerable cost.

If you've cured the cause of penetrating damp by removing piled up soil etc and made sure the pointing is sound - as you'd have to do anyway - leaving things to dry out naturally in a habited house would be my advice.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

In article , stuart noble unstable would be purely cosmetic.

In some ways, it only is. It certainly shouldn't be structural in the cases of shallow footings where there is bound to be some movement. It's only to form a waterproof seal.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

I`ve got a newspaper that I found under our floorboards from 1911 - it`s got a fantastic full front page advert for Rawlplugs.

"4 Tons Held By One Number 25 Rawlplug!" sort of stuff with line drawings of lathes swinging from hooks. Pity the poor sod that had to drill out that hole with his hammer and rawlbit.

Reply to
gribblechips

I'm sorry to say you show complete failure to understand how damp control worked in 1800s buildings. Vic buildings rarely need dpcs, injections, tanking etc to make them fnuction healthily again. The vast majority of the damp problems with Vic houses are due to

  1. attempting to treat them like more modern types of construction, when they approach damp control in a completely different way, and
  2. failure to maintain satisfactorily.

Tanking the walls with aquapanel and painting the exterior are about the last things that will help a Vic house with damp. They are known _causes_ of damp in Vic houses. I'm sure you mean well, but Vic houses do not work like modern buildings at all when it comes to damp.

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Reply to
N. Thornton

I've got a 12' long version of that - quarrying "star drill". The same design is a few centuries old.

There's also the Rawl drill - a hand-cranked hammer drill.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

IME penetrating damp usually manifests itself in the lower part of the wall. Most of the rain runs down the wall, and only starts to soak in lower down.

If the originasl plaster is ok, it's a pretty good sign you don't have a damp problem.

Penetrating damp usually occurs where the mortar has degraded to the point where it is porous or has developed hairline cracks at the join with the bricks.

Reply to
stuart noble

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