Rising damp in Prospect, South Australia

Salt damp in Prospect is rarely a mystery once someone has metered the wall and looked at the ground against it. Rising Damp Adelaide arranges that assessment, in writing, before any repair is priced.

The Prospect pattern

Prospect is largely interwar brick, and that puts it in a different category from the stone suburbs. These houses were built with a damp course. When damp appears at the base of a Prospect wall the likely explanations are, in order: the course has been bridged by later paving, it has cracked as the clay beneath moved, or there is a plumbing leak nobody has found. Injecting a new course into a wall that already has a working one is money spent on the wrong problem, so the assessment matters more here than in the older suburbs.

What the material decides

Prospect is largely red brick bungalows, 1910s to 1930s, and the damp course position is bituminous or slate, frequently cracked. Those two facts narrow the diagnosis a long way before anyone touches the wall — the material decides whether the water travels in the stone or in the mortar, and the era decides whether there is a barrier to have failed in the first place.

The local pattern matters here. Water goes in over winter and comes out over summer, and only the water leaves. Do that for a century and the accumulated salt is what breaks the mortar apart, long before the wall itself is in trouble.

A damp assessment in Prospect

No cost for the assessment. The cost page carries real ranges, which most damp contractors will not publish, and a fixed quote comes after someone has seen the wall.

Nearby: Goodwood, Hyde Park, Semaphore, Port Adelaide.