Rising damp in Moonah, Tasmania

Rising Damp Hobart arranges on-site damp assessments across Moonah 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.

Damp in Moonah homes

Moonah's inter-war and post-war workers' cottages sit on small flat blocks close to one another, which limits how much can be done outside the wall — there is often not enough room to regrade or install drainage without agreement from a neighbour. That constraint tends to push the solution back to the wall itself, so an injected course plus salt-resistant replastering is more commonly the right answer here than it is on a larger block. The older masonry chimney breasts are a frequent trouble spot, drawing moisture up through a stack that no longer has a fire in it to keep it dry.

What the terrain does here

Two things decide the diagnosis here. The stock is 1920s–1960s workers' housing, which tells you whether a damp proof course was ever installed to begin with — below a certain age, none was. The ground is flat, built close together, which tells you where the water is arriving from. Get either wrong and the repair is the wrong repair.

None of this would matter much in a hot climate. In Hobart a wall that gets wet in May has until roughly September before the sun is strong enough to do anything about it, so damage that would stay minor further north keeps progressing here.

Arranging an assessment in Moonah

Before quoting a barrier, any decent assessment checks whether the ground outside sits above your floor level — correcting that is frequently cheaper than anything else on the cost page and occasionally solves the problem outright.

Nearby: Battery Point, Sandy Bay, North Hobart, New Town.