Water leakages are a truly troublesome and harmful threat to your home. For home owners, the prospect of water damage to your homes is enough to give them nightmares. When left unchecked, water can be a truly destructive force of nature. Moreover, it is both difficult to detect and to resolve. Often times, if you have a water leakage in your home, you will have to engage the help of professionals.
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How to Detect Water Leakages
The difficulty in detecting water leakages is twofold. Firstly, water may penetrate into the structure of your home from any number of places. This includes from weather exposed surfaces as well as from internal leakages. Moreover, water is capable of travelling large distances along the hidden parts of your home. Eventually, water accumulates at a particular spot, according to the path of least resistance. It is here where you will often see the first symptoms of the leakage.
Another difficulty with water leakages is that the first symptoms are often missed out on. This includes peeling paint, loss of colour from your walls, musky smells and the presence of small mould or mildew. If you spot any of these signs, you should treat them seriously and conduct further tests. For example, you could use moisture meters or even chip off the front surface area to check for any decay or mould.
Another easy tell-tale sign is that of drastic changes in your water meter. If no significant changes were made to your family’s water consumption pattern, then a difference in the water meter readings may be due to a hidden pipe leak.
The Dangers of Water Leakages
While water leakages have an unpredictable nature, there are certain places in your home that are more prone to leakages. These include wet areas such as your bathroom and weather exposed surfaces such as your balcony. As such, they are prime suspects when tracing a water leakage back to its source.
Water leakages should be treated with utmost care and concern. When water penetrates the surface of your home, a perfect environment for mould is created owing to both the lack of light and the abundance of moisture. Consequently, the mould slowly decays the structural integrity of your home, thus endangering all its inhabitants.
If a water leakage is confirmed or suspected, you should waste no time in getting in touch with a local waterproofing company. The earlier the issue is raised, the more time waterproofing contractors have to trace the source of the leakage and to repair your home. Subsequently a full maintenance of current waterproofing systems can be conducted. More importantly, it may just safeguard the well being of your family.