Testing Basement Floor For Moisture

If there are any mortars grouts or adhesives they must be removed and ground down to expose a clean section of concrete.

Testing basement floor for moisture.

Water trickling out of walls. This is a low cost low tech moisture test that can be useful for determining if you have moisture in a garage or basement floor. Standing water on floor. A third option a simple diy test can indicate the presence of excess moisture either on the slab surface or in the room s air but it cannot measure.

This is a relative scale. How to test a concrete floor for excessive moisture. Then a step by step process for addressing each problem is presented along with several detailed approaches to solving the problem. Plastic sheet moisture test.

However if you have moisture under. For those slabs with a pre existing floor covering an extra step is involved to test for moisture. Few scenes put fear into homeowners like spotting water on the basement floor for the first time and rightly so too because this can be a sign of bigger problems and must be taken seriously. It is not however the best test if you are planning to put an epoxy coating on the floor.

Seal around the edges and leave it for several days. Moisture meters include visual led indicators related to the percent reading on the scale for dry moderate and saturated or wet readings. If you get moisture on the exposed surface then the problem is condensation. To test your basement for moisture tape a piece of plastic or tin foil onto the basement floor.

How and why water comes up from the basement floor can vary so investigative work is needed before panicking. The insulation and ventilation in your finished basement will correct the problem. This page briefly describes moisture sources moisture movement mechanisms and typical basement moisture problems. When testing the moisture content in non wood materials such as concrete a relative scale of 0 to 100 is often used where 0 is bone dry and 100 is saturated.

Only then can you test properly for moisture using the following test methods. A second direct test astm f 1869 standard test method for measuring moisture vapor emission rate of concrete subfloor using anhydrous calcium chloride was standardized in the 1990s by the subcommittee on practices of the committee on resilient floor coverings.