Health
Mould needs moisture, and in Adelaide the moisture is more often condensation than salt damp. Working out which decides whether you spend hundreds or thousands.
Mould is the symptom people act on, because it is visible and because of what they have read about it. Rising Damp Adelaide arranges assessments that establish the moisture source first, since cleaning mould off a wall that is still wet only schedules the next clean.
This surprises owners and it is diagnostically useful. The salt that rising damp carries into masonry is hostile to mould growth — it draws water out of cells, which is precisely why salt has been used to preserve food for millennia. So a wall with genuine salt damp tends to show a tide mark, efflorescence, lifting paint and crumbling mortar, and comparatively little black mould.
Heavy black spotted mould running from skirting to ceiling, with no salt bloom and no level tide mark, is very unlikely to be rising damp. It is almost always condensation, and that is a much cheaper problem.
Winter, and the numbers explain why. The 9am humidity through June and July sits near 79 per cent with mean maximums around 15.4 °C and overnight minimums near 7.6 °C. A house heated in the evening and shut up overnight puts water vapour into cold air, and it condenses on the coldest surface available — which in a solid stone wall with no insulation is most of the wall.
Extraction at source in the kitchen and bathroom, and genuine air movement through rooms that stay shut. Two weeks of this tells you a great deal.
A single load puts litres of water into the air. In a closed, cool house that water ends up on the walls.
Short bursts of heat create cold surfaces for condensation to form on. Low continuous background warmth creates fewer.
If it persists, or there is salt and a level tide mark, that is when an assessment earns its place.
We are not medical practitioners and we give no health advice. If you are worried about the effect of mould on someone in the house, that is a conversation for a GP or SA Health, not for a damp referral service. What we can establish is where the water is coming from, which is the part that stops it returning.
Tell us what the wall is doing. We will arrange someone to meter it and put the cause in writing.