Rising damp is ground water climbing a wall. Everything else - the salt, the lifting paint, the smell - follows from that one fact.
Talk it throughRising Damp Ipswich assesses and treats damp across Ipswich and the western corridor.
Ipswich is the oldest provincial city in Queensland, and it has the housing to prove it. The centre and the older suburbs carry solid masonry from the 1860s onward, built before the damp proof course was standard practice and in many cases built without one at all. A solid wall is a single continuous path from the footing to the plaster, so whatever is in the ground has a route all the way up.
Around that centre sits the timber Queenslander, and the Queenslander is where confusion can start. A house standing on stumps, with air moving underneath it and nothing touching the frame, cannot get rising damp in its walls. There is no contact with the ground for water to climb. A path or slab poured against the bearers changes that, which is the Sadliers Crossing case.
What is true is what happened to many of those houses later. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, building in underneath was the cheapest way to add a room, a laundry or a garage. That work put brick or block on the ground, frequently on a slab poured level with the yard, and almost never with a damp proof course — because the house above it had never needed one. That is a rising damp mechanism created by a renovation, and it applies wherever a Queenslander has been built in underneath.
Then there is the interwar and early postwar brick on the ridges. That housing usually does have a damp course, typically bitumen, and bitumen has a service life. It goes brittle with age and it fails quietly, with nothing visible happening on the outside of the building.
Finally, the newest housing. Brick veneer standing on a slab with a membrane under it does not get rising damp, whatever the wall looks like. If a house was built in the last thirty years and a wall is wet, the cause is a leak, a shower, drainage or condensation. Saying otherwise would be the fastest way to lose an owner's trust, and it would also be wrong.
Water climbs until it evaporates off the face of the wall as fast as it arrives from below. That balance point is usually somewhere between 600mm and 1.2m up, and it is remarkably level, because the physics is the same along the whole wall. A leak makes a patch. A roof makes a stain that runs downward. Rising damp draws a line.
Most of Ipswich's rain falls between November and March, so damp fed from the ground is at its worst in late summer. How that differs from condensation is on the condensation page.
We work across the Ipswich local government area and the western corridor.
Rising Damp Ipswich