DPC Installation in Washington

When a Washington house has damp low on a wall, the first place we look is anywhere the building has been added to. Garage conversions are the common one: the garage floor slab usually sits lower than the house floor, and if the new room's walls were not given their own damp course and membrane, ground moisture reaches the new plaster. The same happens where an extension or a conservatory base was built with its damp course at a different height from the house's. Injecting along the affected run and correcting the detail sorts it. The other common cause is an outside path or patio relaid higher than the original, which happens a lot when drives are block paved. In those cases correcting the outside levels comes before any work on the wall itself, because the injection would only be bridged again.

The older cottages around Washington Village, Fatfield and the lower ground towards the river are a different story. They stand on solid walls with old or missing damp courses, and the ground near the river stays wet for longer after rain. On those houses we inject at the right height for the floor inside, replace the salty plaster, and check gutters and downpipes, because water dumped at the foot of a wall makes any damp course work harder. The stone cottages in particular need the cream injected along their mortar joints and a breathable plaster afterwards, since hard modern plaster on an old stone wall traps moisture behind it. We explain what we find on the survey and only include the walls that genuinely have rising damp in the quote.