On 2012-07-17, Frank Erskine wrote:

On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:44:00 +0100, Adam Funk
wrote:

On 2012-07-17, Ian Jackson wrote:

When the bottom of the legs are quite dry, and it's not going to rain, I
occasionally stand each leg of my garden seats in plastic pots. I then
fill the pots with some anti-rot preservative (the expensive, £20+ per 5
litres, clear stuff), and top up as required. Several hours later, when
it's obvious that no more is going to soak into the legs, I remove the
pots, and reclaim any unused preservative.

In the basement, where the damp comes up rather than down &
appearances aren't important, I put washed tuna tins under the legs of
a set of wooden shelves and poured some wood preserver in them. After
the legs soaked it up, I couldn't think of any reason to bother
removing the tins.

The trouble is that any moisture in the timber will tend to run down
the legs and be trapped by the tins, keeping the legs damp.

Well, possibly, but the tins' bases have circular ridges instead of
being perfectly flat, the legs are about 1 cm × 4 cm so there's air
circulation on the sides of the legs within the tins, & in any case
I'm sure *much* more moisture was going up from the cellar floor than
back down.