Rising, penetrating and condensation, and why the treatments fail.
Most damp we see in Liverpool houses has been treated at least once already. Injected, tanked, painted with something from a tin, and back within two winters. That is usually because the cause was never found, only the symptom.
The three kinds of damp
Rising damp comes up from the ground through walls with no working damp proof course. It stops around a metre high, leaves a tide mark, and the plaster above the line is dry. Penetrating damp comes in from outside through a defect, a cracked gutter, a failed pointing joint, a leaking flashing, and it appears wherever the water lands, often high up or in a corner. Condensation is water from inside the house, cooking, showers and breathing, landing on cold surfaces, and it shows as black mould in corners, behind furniture and around windows. They look similar to a homeowner and they need completely different fixes.
Why treatments fail
Injecting a damp course into a wall that has penetrating damp does nothing, because the water is not coming from the ground. Tanking a wall with condensation moves the moisture to the next cold surface. Anti mould paint hides condensation for a season and then the mould comes through it. The most common misdiagnosis we see is condensation called rising damp because the tide mark happened to be low, followed by rising damp called condensation because the tenant was blamed for drying washing indoors. Both get treated wrongly.
The bit that gets missed
Ventilation. A Victorian terrace was built to leak air. Once it gets new windows, a blocked up chimney and sealed floors, the moisture that used to leave the house stays in it. Approved Document F sets extract rates for every kitchen and bathroom, and most houses we survey fail them. A £100 extractor fan fitted properly cures more mould than any amount of chemical treatment, and it is the first thing we check.
How we approach it
Readings on every wall with a calibrated meter, inside and out, high and low, so the pattern shows which kind of damp it is. Every wet room checked for extract against Part F. Photographs of every defect. Then a written cause and recommendation for each one, and a costed proposal by trade if you want it fixed. The Property Survey is £250 and comes off the works if we do them. It is not free because a free damp survey is a sales visit, and that is how most of the houses we see ended up treated twice.
Checked 20/09/2026.
Act Now Energy Ltd is ECMK accredited (Reg. ECMK307661) and TrustMark registered for retrofit assessment (TMLN 4110101), led by a Chartered Construction Manager (MCIOB), covering Liverpool, Merseyside and the North West. Call 0777 888 80 80 or email info@actnowenergy.co.uk.
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Act Now Energy Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 16818951. ECMK Reg. ECMK307661 | TrustMark Licence TMLN 4110101
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© 2026 Act Now Energy Ltd. Company No. 16818951.Photos: Mornington Terrace and Rodney Street, Liverpool by Rodhullandemu (CC BY-SA 4.0), Hope Street by Peter Holmes and Wavertree by Bill Boaden via geograph.org.uk (CC BY-SA 2.0), all via Wikimedia Commons, cropped