Damp Survey and Damp Proofing in Stanground

The older part of Stanground, around the church and the original village street, includes solid-walled brick and rendered properties, former farm buildings and cottages built long before damp-proof courses. Moisture in these buildings moves through the fabric, so the causes of persistent damp are usually the things that trap it: cement render and hard pointing on soft brick, gypsum plaster and modern paints internally, and external ground levels that have risen above internal floor level as paths and driveways have been resurfaced. Correcting those conditions is frequently more effective and less invasive than any injected treatment.

Stanground sits beside the Nene and the Stanground Lode on ground that is low-lying and slow to drain. A high water table affects solid floors, sub-floor voids and below-ground spaces, and in prolonged wet weather surface water can stand against wall bases where paving falls the wrong way or a gully has silted up. Where a property has a suspended timber ground floor, airbricks that have been buried or blocked by an extension or patio allow sub-floor humidity to rise quickly, and joist ends bearing into damp masonry are then at risk of wet rot.

Most of Stanground's housing, however, is twentieth-century and later: interwar and post-war semi-detached houses, substantial estate development from the 1960s onwards, and the modern Cardea development to the south. In cavity-walled housing the usual fabric routes are bridged cavities, mortar debris, slumped retrofitted insulation and defective details over openings. In the newest housing the fabric is rarely the issue at all; airtight construction with mechanical extraction means humidity management is the deciding factor, and the mould appears at cold bridges when that provision is not working.

Because moisture arriving from the ground is a genuine possibility in this part of Peterborough, our inspections include the floors as well as the walls. Solid floors laid without an effective damp-proof membrane, screeds affected by rising moisture, and floor-to-wall junctions where a membrane has not been linked to the wall course are all findings we record. Where a below-ground room is involved, we establish whether water is arriving under hydrostatic pressure before discussing a cavity drain membrane, a cementitious system or simply improving the drainage outside.