Preventing Damp In Your Park Home

Preventing damp is essential in a park home as it can be a harder problem than in a bricks and mortar home. Condensation is one of the main causes of damp. Therefore, it can be harder to prevent in relatively small dwellings, like park homes. This is because sources of warm, moist air are in closer proximity to cold air and surfaces in the rest of the home.

Maintenance

In order to meet the terms of your park home insurance cover, a certain level of maintenance is required. With this in mind, you might consider making routine checks for damp in hidden corners, kitchen cupboards and wardrobe bottoms part of a regular schedule of checks. You may also want to work some of the other points we discuss here into the same schedule.

Declutter

To prevent damp, you first have to be able to spot the early signs. A cluttered space with lots of things on the floor or piled up in corners obscures areas where the signs of damp might be detectable. You may want to start with decluttering, depending on your circumstances, so that any problems can be spotted early and dealt with before they build into something worse.

There are many online guides and gurus you may want to consult with great ideas about how best to declutter. You could also look at our guide to decluttering your park home where we have outlined some approaches that might interest you.

The problem with mould

You may become aware of a damp problem by the discovery of mould in your home. While there are plenty of sprays, paints and treatments available to treat mould, you may want to begin by trying to prevent it, by reducing the sources and causes of damp. This way you can hopefully avoid putting yourself or your loved ones at risk of any of the health issues that can be caused by mould.

Go to the source

You are probably aware of all the ways you generate moisture in the air inside your park home. You may need to pay special attention to the bathroom and the kitchen. Steam from showers, kettles, sinks and cooking can all build up. When this moist air reaches colder air in your home or cold surfaces it will condense out of the air in small droplets and you potentially have the beginning of a damp problem.

If you are aware of where some condensation is unavoidable depending on your specific circumstances, regular checks and wiping down will help prevent anything harmful building up. But again, you will probably be best served by looking into other means of earlier prevention wherever possible. 

Ventilation

If you can, whenever the weather and your comfort and security permits, throw open as many doors and windows to let fresh air circulate. This will let moist warm air escape and drier air enter, helping to dry surfaces and to even the temperature throughout your home. You may notice a significant improvement just by doing this more regularly.

You may also want to add to your maintenance schedule, regular checks of vents and extractor fans. You may benefit greatly from regularly clearing debris and cleaning vents and fans, both inside and out.

Maintain air conditioning to prevent damp

Nobody wants the technology that is there to make your atmosphere more pleasant to turn into the problem. Air conditioning systems will have their own manufacturer’s recommended maintenance routines. If, with normal use, you follow the manufacturer’s recommendations, your air-conditioning should not become part of the problem but can help in moving air around your home. This makes the temperature uniform throughout and helps to ventilate your park home.

 Check seals

Particularly if you are in an older home, you might be able to prevent unwanted moisture coming into your home with regular checks of seals around doors and windows. Simply running an absorbent cloth round seals can identify the problem. You can then use some sealant products to patch up any problem areas. However, you might want to completely replace any seals that are beginning to perish. You may prefer prevention to cure.

Check the exterior

If you do have a persistent problem with damp in your park home, you may find the source of the problem on the outside of your home. In any case, you may want to make external checks of the sides and roof of your park home a part of your maintenance routine. If you can spot and repair problems with roof tiles, gutters, drain pipes, drains, side panels or window and door seals early, you may be able to avoid larger problems in the future.

Evenly heat your park home to prevent damp

Because of the energy price rises of recent times, you may be faced with a trade-off between heating your home evenly all over, which can really help reduce condensation, or mainly heating just the one room where you spend most of the time. It might help if you are aware of the need to spread heat evenly throughout the home, so that you can do this when your circumstances allow. Otherwise it may be a good idea, in the circumstances, to keep the warm air separate from the colder air with closed doors and draft-excluders.

We hope the information provided here can assist you in preventing damp inside your park home.

This is a marketing article from Park Home Assist, multi-award-winning providers of residential park home insurance.  If you would like to speak to an advisor regarding insurance for your park home, please contact our friendly team in our Northampton office on 01604 946 796.

Please note that all insurance cover is subject to acceptance of terms and conditions.

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Published – 21/04/23