On 10 Sep 2005 12:24:47 -0700, wrote:

| I hate to be a wet blanket, but bear with me for a while.
| .
| In 1994 I replaced a coal boiler with a gas combi. In 1999
| water was running down the living room wall. After eliminating
| the obvious candidates, slates, flaunching, pointing, flashing
| etc I was left with only one option - the flue (the products of
| combustion are carbon dioxide and water). This proved to be the
| case. It had been damaged on installation and, for five years had
| been pumping water into a 75cm shale wall with soil/lime mortar.
| The flue was replaced.
| .
| Six years on, the wall is still not completely dry despite my having,
| this year, chopped off and repointed the bottom metre of external
| rendering and run a 2kw fire and a dehumidifier in the sealed room for
| 8 - 10 hours a day.
| .
| Another side effect (this is speculation)is that the formerly sound
| rendering has been loosened by winter frost action on the moisture in
| the wall, so I may have to replace this as well.
| .
| The moral of this story is to assume nothing about the behaviour of
| damp. All you can do is find its source, block it, do what you can to
| dry it, then wait, wait, wait.
| .
| The mystery, to me, is why, in this age of technological wizardry, when
| probes can be landed on other planets and the evolution of a life can
| be tracked from ejaculation to delivery, there is no simple hand held
| device which, either electronically or seismologically, can detect the
| precise location of moisture in a wall. Moisture meters are a nonsense:
| they tell you what you can see or, by running your hand over the wall,
| feel, but tell you nothing (without drilling) about what is happening
| within it.
|
| Tony.

--
Dave Fawthrop dave hyphenologist co uk
"Intelligent Design?" my knees say *not*.
"Intelligent Design?" my back says *not*.