Moisture Risk
Moisture is at the root of many of the most common building failures.
At Greengauge, we have extensive expertise in helping our clients avoid these failures, or diagnosing and remediation when the unexpected has already happened. From deep energy retrofit and protecting heritage assets to best-practice new build, we work on a wide range of types and scales of project and can tailor our approach according to your needs and budget. We also support a variety of clients with research and development as well as obtaining certification and approvals. We are independent consultants so our advice is impartial.
We bring to bear our experience using a suite of software tools and industry standard laboratory analysis to provide professional advice. We maintain strong links with several academic institutions to help us stay on the cutting edge of the field. We offer basic material analysis and characterisation in-house and work with trusted partners to deliver more sophisticated testing.
From deep energy retrofit and protecting heritage assets to best-practise new build we can tailor our approach according to your needs and budget
Hygrothermal risk assessment
WUFI® modelling is just one of the software tools that Greengauge can employ to assess moisture risk. WUFI offers a way to simulate moisture movement in buildings and model how water moves around within porous materials.
To run a simulation, the details of the wall or element make-up, climate data and internal conditions for the building are all inputted into the WUFI software. The WUFI model is then able to predict the temperature and moisture content at any point within the element’s structure, making it possible to assess whether problems such as mould could occur.
When undertaking moisture risk assessments to inform insulation solutions for retrofit projects. It can be crucial to understand the key moisture transport of the existing wall materials to enable the assessor to select the most appropriate and representative material for the assessment, making the results much more reliable.
Material testing
We offer two types of material testing for moisture risk assessment – invasive and non-invasive
- Non-invasive Karsten tube testing – where the absorptivity of existing masonry is assessed on site using small tubes of water. The rate at which the masonry absorbs this water is measured and an absorption coefficient is calculated.
- Invasive testing and laboratory characterisation – testing core samples from the masonry to determine some of the key properties. We can attend site to take material samples or characterise suitable samples extracted by the client.
In our lab, we can prepare and test the samples to obtain key physical and moisture transport properties such as the absorption coefficient, density, capillary saturation, reference water content, and sorption curves.
