No damp course.....have you put one in?

[Musicmonkey<ADDRESS><STRONG>Musicmonkey<STRONG><ADDRESS>]

There was a post recently about damp to which I contributed but as per normal I can't trace it now. 

A friend who also has an old property in France took a large drill and made holes all round the interior of their stone cottage at 6" intervals at a height of about 12 - 18" and pumped it full of goo (dpc).  Has anyone else tried this and did it prevent damp problems?  Our friends still have a rogue damp patch even having gone to this trouble and expense.

We already have a VMC running all the time ( mechanical ventilation).  We have a dehumidifier running all the time the house is empty and we have (for better or worse) had a thin layer of polystyrene put under the wallpaper up to about 3'.  If anything our damp problem is worse than before.  We have not yet ripped out our lovely tiled terrace that runs the whole length of the house as that is a bit drastic.

Basically, we are getting desperate as we rent the place out and black mould on the walls is not very inviting.  We are going to have to redecorate anyway but really need to resolve the damp problem first.

Any advice welcome.

 

 

[Anton Redman]

The UK obsession with DPCs goes back to Victorian Times when a combination of soft brick, no DPCs and streets which were little more than slow moving sewers meant both rain water and SH1T were being sucked into the houses. Scrape the land back, install land drains cure the cause not the effect.  Link below is typical of those which you find if you search for DPCs using google.  Our probelm went away once we had the land scraped away and had heat in the house in winter. As another probelm I am fairly sure our lime based mortar would loose strenth if completely dry.

http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/risingdamp/risingdamp.htm