On 17 Aug, 12:24, Tabby wrote:
On Aug 17, 9:25*am, PeterC wrote:



Last Autumn there was a mention in a thread about 1950's brickwork being
porous.
About that time I had to drill a couple of holes in the gable wall - it
faces SW - and the debris was like a crumbly paste rather than dust for
about 15 - 20mm in.
The bricks are heavily patterned - a vertical herringbone groove - which I
think are Rustic(?) from c. 1950.

Is it worth treating the wall and, if so, what sort of gunk to put on it?

There are 2 possibilities on this page

http://www.everbuild.co.uk/products/...s/26,Surface-T...

although the solvent-based one looks a bit nasty!

Any suggestions please?

More or less all above ground wall bricks are porous. What you propose
is a classic mistake. Read SPAB's guidance on such things if you're
still tempted.

NT

I've read the SPAB advice (and been on a couple of of their very good
training courses) - but I disagree with their purist standpoint on
masonry treatments.

They would have you cut out and replace every spalled brick. In my
case that would have been several thousand bricks. A cure is no cure -
if it bankrupts the customer.

I asked a lot of different people, got a lot of different answers -
but the best advice I got was "it depends", and that for my situation
silane/siloxane was the solution *most likely* to make a sane
compromise.

So far - results have borne this out.

If you live in a scheduled ancient monument you'll probably have to do
it the hard way, similarly if the problem is small (or your wallet
very large) it's probably no hardship to go for the rolls-royce
solution. For the rest of us, there's compromise.