Managing Condensation Can Be Very Tricky

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Managing Condensation Can Be Very Tricky

A problem for the majority of home owners is condensation. Particularly if live somewhere cold and wet like I do, Blackpool England. Damp is one of the worse things for your home, it can cause no end of trouble for both the building and its contents. In this Article we are going to look at condensation and how easily its can be cured. Both in your home and Caravan.

The main difficulty in tracing condensation is distinguishing it from penetrating damp. Conden-sation is caused when moisture in the air meets a cold surface. Obviously, rooms where steam gathers bathrooms and kitchens are most prone to it, particularly the outside walls, which are more likely to be cold.

There is an easy test for whether damp on a wall is caused by condensation. Dry a small patch with a cloth and fasten a little piece of glass to it, bedded on a ring of putty. Leave the glass until it mists up, then see if the mist is on the inside in which case it's penetrating damp or on the outside in which case it's condensation.

The causes of condensation are complex and it's notoriously difficult to cure. Possible solutions to the problem centre either around cutting down the amount of moisture in the air, or making sure that there are no surfaces for it to condense by warming them up.

Cutting down the moisture in the air can be difficult in rooms like kitchens and bathrooms, where there are obvious and necessary sources of steam. Usually the best answer is to increase the ventilation getting damp air quickly out of the room and replacing it with fresh, dry air. This means installing an extractor fan with a large air capacity, ducted to the outside.

Warming the room up may simply be a matter of adding a heater or turning up the existing heating. But it's quite likely particularly where only an outside wall is affected that the problem is more one of insulation than of heat input. In this case, improving the insulation may well provide a solution.

Of course with a caravan you don't get such an option. It those circumstances you will have to make do with a de-humidifier, which will go some distance to fixing the problem.

The easiest way to insulate a wall locally is to line it with an insulating material. In minor cases, expanded polystyrene wall covering or heat reflecting wallpaper may be successful.

More radical methods involve drylining the wall with plasterboard over a layer of insulating material. If you do this, you must provide a vapour check to cut down condensation inside the cavity behind the board. Special vapour check board is available. You can also get a variety of products which deal with condensation in another way; they tackle the symptoms rather than the cause removing the damp rather than stopping it forming. For example, you can get absorbent strips for windows. Although these are not a permanent cure, they can be useful in localized trouble spots such as a small window.