Assessing moisture in porous traditional building materials

Historic England is often asked for advice on damp problems in historic and traditional buildings. Whilst many different methods are commonly used to assess damp problems in walls, all have some drawbacks. There is lack of agreement over how they should be used and little information about how they compare one with another. This project developed a common methodology in the laboratory to compare the performance of a range of invasive and non-invasive moisture measurement methods used to assess moisture in porous masonry. The findings suggested that most of the measurement techniques can provide good semi-quantitative estimates of moisture levels in porous traditional building materials.