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Hello and welcome to Ministry of Mould. This is a really short presentation I'll try and keep it to about 10 minutes or less to look at damp and structural damp versus condensation and mould. What are they, why are they different, how are they different and how you can really quickly tell the difference. This is designed to be for letting agents property managers painter decorators gutter cleaners Builders anyone involved with Buildings Construction really the management of buildings hopefully this will help you help your customers and point them in the right direction
okay so this broadly there's three main types of damp to think about rising damp probably everyone's heard of penetrating damp again that's sort of things that have come through the walls so cracked render uh broken guttering things like that cause penetrating damp and the last one is condensation and mould which is my specialism uh condensation of mould is is generally more related to humidity and things like that but we'll have a look at it so there you've got the two types on the slide so on the left you've got what would typically be due to condensation and mould on the right you've got more structural damage and so if we have a look at that one closer up you can see that there's structural damage causing the plaster to degrade there's salt damage there there's uh there's issues with um the plasters flaking the paint has fallen off okay so this is a structural damp problem there is some moisture coming through that wall either from penetrating damppours coming up from the ground okay and that is creating this problem again here around a doorway the dead giveaway in this picture and something to look out for is it's yellow staining that you can see the yellow is is due to salts which are carried through the wall by by movement of water so rain water coming through and it washes these salts to the surface once they're there to be honest the plaster has had it and you've got to start again so yeah this is the salt so you can see here this white fluffy that is it's like cotton wool if you really wanted to you could wipe your finger on it and lick it and it tastes just like table salt um because it is basically it's so in a fluffy form that comes out so that's called efflorescent salts and that that if you ever see that that is a dead giveaway that there is water penetration so that could be a broken guttering again you render um pointing needs redoing things like that things you probably want to talk to a builder about let me come on to mould compensation and mould problems which is where where Ministry of mould comes in so you can see in this picture this is some classic mould in a corner of a room very typically makes this kind of triangle pattern if you can see on that picture it goes up and damp the corners of the room this is due to something called the Venturi effect which is getting a bit technical but basically if you see that pattern you know it's due to movement of moisture through the air and it settles out preferentially in that corner because the airflow isn't as great so again this is just another picture here and showing the mould and you can see the extent of the mould predominantly in the corner and here behind a front door on someone's property um very cold obviously my front doors they open they close there's always a slight draft even with some of the best doors and that is generally a cold area because this coldness coming off the door into the wall okay so you get that band of mould where it's found the cold area and again we go back to the cold so one of the things that we would do on a damp survey were you to ask military mould to do you want is to look at a thermal imaging camera and we find Cold spots so this is just one I've taken for the presentation so this is a window in my own house there's no particular problem here this is a a pretty good window I would think but you can see it's still got cold so that purple is where it's cold around the window and that's why even in the best houses in the morning if there's two people sleeping in the same bedroom there's often condensation on Windows and that's you're breathing out you breathe out about a pint to two pints overnight pint and a half probably each person and that goes into the air and that has to settle somewhere so it will go to these cold points around the window because of the interplay between cold and humidity and when we look at condensation problems we look at relative humidity and the dew point so for any uh basically in a room if you get to 100 relative humidity all the water will fall out of that room okay that is uh rain in effect uh rain and the water's just falling out so you can go somewhere like a Malaysian rainforest which I've been to and it's incredibly humid and wet and that would be like 99 humidity yeah or even 100 humidity all the water in the air is just coming out of the air okay so you don't want to get to that point in your house obviously it's the lower the humidity the better the dew point in that in that image 13.9 there that shows the temperature that if the wall is at that temperature or less um moisture will condense out of the air so you if you're all your walls in your house you've got one particular wall it's below the dew point all the time it's really likely you're going to get mould for on it okay unless you can dilute the air with mechanical extraction or you can warm the walls up to lift them above the dew point those are your two methodologies so you can see this is a laser temperature measure the sort that's really common and we're all used to them from covid getting Zapped in the head with one going into a bar yeah so that is just one of these pointed at the wall 12.9 so back to this humidity that was in the room 13.9 you can see that that particular area is very prone to getting condensation and mould for me and you can actually see some mould in the picture there okay so again when we look at temperature you've got the picture on the left here that is a mansard roof so a sloping roof um and there's two lines you can see with not much mould so those are actually where the timber joists are if you imagine the roof and then between the joists there's no insulation so you've got cold spot warmer spot cold spot warmer spot cold spot and that's where you get the mould for me the picture on the right is a is a loft hatch obviously but if you think about it that loft is probably insulated all the way around and then what commonly happens is someone just puts a wooden panel Loft hatching you know it's just a piece of piece of plywood so that is cold compared to the surrounding area so this property which had a massive humidity problem um the the humid air has just found that cold spot and condensed out on that wood and caused that very heavy mould so one of the ways that I've briefly touched on to solve condensation in mould is to increase ventilation so increasing air changes in the property so for that reason I would always check fans if they're installed so the image on the left of that's using a something called an animator that measures the airflow through a fan so there might be a fan installed might be complete rubbish yeah I mean there's building Rags would say what sort of Speed The Fan should be running at and that's what I would check um for yourselves if you're if you're popping into a property and you just want to know is that fan all right or not I really recommend just get a bit of toilet paper in a bathroom hold it on the ceiling or on the wall and take your hand away and it should stay there it should be any decent fan you'll be able to hold toilet paper on it you can see this fan okay it doesn't doesn't work at all so what do we do then to resolve mould problems at Ministry of mould well couple of things ready but one of the main ones is is we do mould fogging so so mould is now considered an extremely hazardous toxin to human health uh two people have died in the last year um it is a toxin and so what we want to do is kill that mould and stop those spores causing issues particularly with children with asthma elderly people anyone like that we don't want those spores causing problems so on the left-hand image you can see I'm just demonstrating a fogging machine there that is uh one of the types we use we've got several different types of machine on the right there is a cleanup so we use specialist products which kill the mould very different to bleach bleach just gets rid of the color it doesn't kill the mould so the mould will just come back really quick we use specialist products we don't use bleach kills all the mould and then we coat the walls with a surface film that then prevents mould growing for a long term yeah so here's just a little example for you on the left hand side you've got um this is a bathroom and a flat and extra you can see ridiculously heavy mould in there pretty awful but you know after I clean up I think you'd agree to look pretty awesome unfortunately we can do anything about the paint that cracks off um but you know this is an incredible cleanup from old so very happy with that and then one of the other tools in our Arsenal is a PIV system called a positive input ventilation unit these things go in the Loft like this there's a unit on the left and all the the occupant of the property the tenant or the homeowner rear sees day-to-day is this kind of dinner plate there and the way they work is they pull in fresh air from The Loft and they push it damp into the house and that continually ventilates the property continually keeps that humidity level damp and keeps the air fresh and people absolutely love these they they will get rid of condensation on Windows that you typically have in the mornings all will be gone with one of these absolutely brilliant units pretty cost effective to put in and importantly if you are a landlord very cheap to run so we install these as well as do all the mould removals um I'm pretty much providing a complete service for for mould and condensation problems so if you've got any questions take a look at the website Ministry of mould.co.uk or email hello Ministry of mould.co.uk and I really hope this has been useful thanks very much