Excellent video. It's great because you aren't using any fancy equipment, yet you are making some great diagnosis which most people would completley miss.
I'm glad you like it Paul. This could be a very costly mistake especially on a pre purchase survey.....Just goes to show what a damp can do to those timbers. Also got a good video of condensation to flooring nails. I will be using this on another video about where to look for a timber decay issue, with limited opening up :)
Hi Dave. I wouldn't perhaps take a picture of a drain that doesn't have an issue, and add it to the report....more prudent to take a picture to keep just incase of a future issue with a dispute.
Thanks for the kind comment :) I will do a short video on the drying of the sub floor void, along with all the data logging of it. If you look on Instagram (Complete Preservation) you will see a thermal imaging video of the drying equipment in action.
Good stuff. One Question: how long does/can it take for wet rot to take hold? I'm thinking Scottish conditions with sort wet days of winter then long drier days of summer giving an annual cycle where the rots can progress then stall, and go again the next winter, taking years, possibly, before you spot the rot and then step through the floorboard at the worst point, adjacent to a weather facing air vent delivering 95%-99% humid cold air for weeks onto the joist flooring 😬. Some exposed place in England will be nearly as bad😟.
It really depends on the conditions and the length of time of those conditions. Wet rots will intermittently start and stop just like dry rots. I did mess about with this a few years back and I couldn’t kill off either, as soon as I introduced moisture they started again. I have got one I’ll post I have been doing on dry rot as it’s quite interesting 👍
Just to say we had a local building preservation surveyor round to look at our scenario (we'd discovered the rot originally because I wanted to install an underfloor telephone line). The surveyor confirmed it was wet rot, without rising damp, and reckoned that it had probably been developing over 10+ years with annual spurts through the winter. The solum is glacial rubble, so while well drained from a water table perspective, it does have a lot of capillary moistness from the slope behind. Being only a crawl space under the floor boards there is also likely to be a radiative heating element direct from the under-floor to the solum that increase the moisture load (opposite direction of radiative heating compared to underfloor heating of living space systems). We've also found one downpipe had a leak about 30cm above ground level (adjacent to the worst rot) and all the air bricks are only 3cm above concrete path and the air directly impinges on the adjacent joists. So lots of contributing factors. @@completepreservation
