One of the best ways to avoid water damage in the home is to pay attention to what's going on outside the house. Let's face it, water that stays outdoors presents little potential for indoor water damage. However, water has insidious ways of entering a home—beyond obvious causes like an inundating flash flood. To avoid water damage in your home, it's often necessary to backtrack the indoor effect to an outdoor cause. Here are a few ways outside water gets in:
- Clogged gutters. Your exterior wall or siding is designed to resist rain—not a cascading waterfall from an overflowing gutter. Heavy water flow down the outside of the house from a clogged gutter frequently seeps into interior wall voids. Often, there's no indoor evidence of it—until wood rot and structural damage sets in and/or mold growth is triggered. Make sure your gutters are unobstructed by fallen leaves or other debris.
- Ice dams. An ice dam on the roof results when snow melting off the warmer upper portion of the roof re-freezes near the eaves, locking the flow of runoff into the gutters. Pooling water on the roof penetrates shingles and leaks into the attic. Eventually, you notice drips through the ceiling into living spaces. By then, structural damage, ruined insulation and mold growth have occurred. Heat in the attic warming the roof unevenly is the origin of ice dams. Attention to adequate attic insulation and sealing air leaks into the attic is the best prevention.
- Ground water seepage. A high natural water table exerts hydrostatic pressure on the underside of the foundation as well as basement walls. Ground water can permeate directly through the concrete slab of the house or seep in through cracks in basement walls. The local water table may rise and fall with varying factors such as rainfall so infiltration may be intermittent. Installing a sump pump in your basement is good year-round prevention against ground water damage.
Ask the professionals at Rytech, Inc. about more ways to avoid water damage in the home.
