Battery Point, TAS
Assessment and treatment referrals for 1830s–1870s Georgian homes in Battery Point.
Rising Damp Hobart arranges on-site damp assessments across Battery Point and the neighbouring suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania. Someone meters the walls, compares the ground level outside against your floor inside, and tells you in writing what is causing it before anyone quotes a repair.
Battery Point is the oldest intact housing in Hobart and close to the hardest case for damp. Georgian sandstone and brick cottages sitting on rubble and slate footings, built before a damp proof course was standard, on lanes that fall steeply toward Salamanca. The slope is the complication: a cottage cut into the hill has ground pressing against its uphill wall, so what looks like rising damp on that side is often lateral damp coming through horizontally. The two need different treatments, and telling them apart is the whole point of metering the wall before quoting. Much of the precinct is heritage listed, which decides what methods are available before anyone drills a hole.
Battery Point is predominantly 1830s–1870s Georgian, on ground that is steep, falling to the water. That combination sets what tends to go wrong: the era decides whether there was ever a damp proof course to fail, and the way the block sits decides whether you are dealing with water rising through the base of a wall or pressing against its side. Both are treatable and they are treated completely differently, which is the whole reason the assessment comes first.
Hobart's winter makes either worse. Nine-in-the-morning humidity across the city sits at 76 to 79 per cent from May through July and there are under four hours of sun a day in June, so a wall that takes up moisture has very little opportunity to release it again before spring.
Indicative ranges are on the cost page — injection runs $220 to $450 a linear metre and replastering $90 to $180 a square metre. What moves those numbers most is access and what the wall is made of, which is why the fixed price follows the assessment.
Nearby: Sandy Bay, North Hobart, New Town, South Hobart.
We cover Hobart and the surrounding suburbs, from the Georgian cottages of Battery Point to the post-war brick of Glenorchy and Moonah.
Someone comes out, meters the walls, looks at the ground levels and tells you what is causing it. You get that in writing before anyone quotes a repair.