A Minor Mistake In This Moorooka Home Quickly Became A Flood Of Costs

 by Gavin Godfrey

01 Dec 2021

While humans make mistakes all the time, sometimes, those mistakes can become costly, especially when it involves water ending up somewhere it doesn't belong inside a home. Unfortunately, that fact couldn't be clearer than it was with this Moorooka property, which suffered from a minor mistake that quickly became incredibly costly to the homeowners.

In most cases, the roof is designed to be as water-tight as possible to keep the pounding rain outside and away from your personal belongings as well as the internal structure of your home, both of which can be damaged by excess moisture. Unfortunately, when our team arrived at this Moorooka home, we found traces of water along the ceiling, which prompted us to turn to the thermal imager and moisture meter to try and get an idea of the scale of the problem. Both tools returned a concerning result, and very quickly, we decided we would need to get into the roof space to identify the source of the issue.

Once within the roof space, we were confronted with insulation batts that were utterly saturated. The insulation batts are core to your home's insulation, and if they become wet, they add weight and moisture to the ceiling sheets. In particular, most of the moisture seemed to be centred beneath the vent pipe that penetrated straight through the roof, though we weren't lucky enough to see it directly dripping ourselves.

Upon climbing on top of the roof, we were able to determine exactly what had gone wrong. The vent pipe was initially sealed with a dektite that was adhered to the roof with small amounts of silicone, though the installation was not performed correctly. The original installation didn't use screws and enough silicone, and the dektite had become detached, allowing water to seep beneath it and begin flooding through to the insulation batts below. Thankfully, when we pointed out this issue to our clients, they were able to take it to the then-current owners of the home, who repaired both the leak and the damage it caused prior to the home entering settlement.

Water, left unchecked, can absolutely ravage a home, and you should do everything you can to avoid such an outcome. Fortunately, if you're looking for a building inspector in Brisbane to help you find any issues in any home you'd potentially like to buy, you won't need to look any further than the team here at Ironside Building, Pest, & Pool Inspections. For all building inspections in Brisbane, contact us on 0416 291 179.