Rising damp is rather more of a problem: it is more difficult to diagnose and more costly to treat. It is due to the water present in the ground rising up the walls of a house by capillary action. Whether a house is likely to suffer from rising damp depends on the materials used in [...]

One of the traditional methods for ‘cur­ing’ or, more correctly, masking rising damp is to dry-line an internal wall with plasterboard mounted on a batten frame – leaving a ventilated air space between the lining and the wall. This measure can be adopted for penetrating damp too, but it is expensive and it is much [...]

Before you take any remedial action against penetrating damp, you should make sure that the cause of dampness is indeed water penetration and not con­densation or rising damp.
Generally, penetrating damp is easier to diagnose when you have cavity walls than when you have solid walls. With cavity walls, visible dampness can be more obviously correlated [...]

Rising damp can be dealt with in one of two ways. In the first, the problem itself is not cured but its effects are covered up by lining the inside wall of the house so that the dampness does not appear on the new surface. In the second, the problem is cured by installing a [...]

Dampness in houses can be due to penetrating damp, rising damp or condensation. The treatment for a damp problem depends on which of these three is the cause, so it is important to be able to distinguish between them.
Penetrating damp
As its name suggests, penetrating damp generally occurs when water lands on the outside of a [...]