Pete recently did an interview on BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours - which investigated a case history of failed cavity wall insulation.
Aquapol is a total and confirmed fraud in Europe - the following pages will prove this - as do the many European court rulings against them. But what is REALLY shocking is that the whole thing is a part of the world wide Scientology scam business. Aquapol doesn't work, and never has. It's 'inventor' and the company have been declared bankrupt. Bankruptcy proceedings in the Austrian legal system - links to court files The bloke who sells this crap in the UK - is a long time member of this crackpot religious cult - Scientologists - Scroll down about 40 names and Val Juhasz name shows he has been a scientology member, and member of the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises since March 2004
I am being contacted by a lot of people who are being approached by the latest drying system called Aquapol. It's being flogged by a bunch of Europeans - who seem to be based loosely in Austria, Hungary, and Poland. It's a wonderful invention - you hang a magnet from the roof, and all of a sudden all the moisture in your house vanishes. (Apparently) It's a very expensive magnet - usually about £5,000 worth of magnet plus vat. It's very ugly - looks like a plastic wasps nest, and they hang it from your ceiling. These people are exhibiting at shows all over the place - including the Period Home shows. (Update - they have been banned from the Period Home Shows) Its a flashy presentation, and of course, like all damp sales pitches, the surveys are free.
Its sold in the UK by a bloke who is either Romanian, Hungarian, or English depending on which document you download from Companies House.
We've recently seen them advertising in the SPAB newsletter - as you can imagine SPAB are being put firmly in their place by others for even considering this ...
A client got them to survey a house. A big house. With known problems and simple solutions. He has high ground levels causing penetrating damp, and lack of ventilation, causing interstitial condensation within the walls in some areas of the house. All very simple issues - easily fixed by sorting the ground levels and roof drainage, and improving overall ventilation.
In come Aquapol. Their flashy Aquapol brochure says 'rising damp specialists since 1985'. Well deary me - if they really had the solution to rising damp, which has so blighted our homes since the damp industry invented it in the 1960's, you'd have thought they'd have eliminated it by now - they've only had 32 years to get it sorted out! Their brochure says they've dried out 'several residential properties' and several castles.. WOW! There must be some seriously deluded people out there to believe in this - including a member of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation - the IHBC - who apparently think they know something about old buildings in this country - who claims to have overseen a test installation by them. I've seen the survey and figures - and there are so many holes in the IHBC supervision that you could drive a bus through them. Clearly the bloke knows little about damp, moisture, its causes, and methods of transport. A magnetic lampshade - what planet are you on IHBC?
So back to the survey. Well - first he get a load of pretty pictures of a porch. Its a cold porch with gypsum plaster showing typical condensation damage. And high ground levels which are creating penetrating damp issues as well. Then he got a load of pictures of spalling stone externally, with cement mortar jointing. All that's needed here is to drop the ground levels a bit, and rake out the cement and replace it with hot lime mortar jointing. And take out the bushes growing against the wall, dropping that ground level too. Cheap and cheerful stuff. In the porch, introduce a bit of ventilation, and replace the gypsum with lime. Total cost - about £1k for a bloke to take a few barrow loads of soil away from the wall, and do a bit of plastering.
So what's Aquapol or 'Core Conservation' up to at this point in the quote? Well - by they attempted to convince the client that they were being very technical.
Apparently (in their report it says) they use a TROTEC state of the art digital microwave moisture meter / digital wall scanner - and its made in Germany, so it MUST be really good. Apparently it can find moisture up to 30 cm deep. There's only one problem with this ... it doesn't measure moisture. It measures conductivity. The quote shows beautiful images of 'damp' in the wall, recorded by these conductivity meters (they are just fancy German damp meters) to convince the client that there's a major 'rising damp' issue - the red bits of the image mean the house is about to fall down. Apparently Red / Orange areas of the picture mean the wall is VERY DAMP while DARK BLUE means its dry. Oh God - the bottom of the test walls were so red, it was so scarey.
They quote BS 7913 - knowing full well that a Conservation Officer will want a non-invasive system and they need to have some form of British Standard to hang their hat on. OK - so they mentioned BS7913 (Don't get me wrong here - I fully endorse 7913 - the author, Prof. John Edwards is a champion of conservation, and I helped review the standard when it came out).
Moving on in the 'quote' - out comes the carbide testing kit. Now they've quoted already that their 'damp meters' are giving them 65 to 150 readings. God knows what the numbers mean - but they look impressive. Then they do a carbide test, and tell us that actually, despite all this horror damp stuff, numbers in the 150 range, and red pictures of the wall, the total moisture content of the wall is about 5%.
Oh... so its dry then. Thank heaven for that...
But the quote goes on - You know those American videos: "Great idea this - you have to watch RIGHT TO THE END... just another ten minutes of bullshit, then we'll give you the magic recipe - BUT THERES MORE - keep listening folks....." and you never do get to the end because you get sick of the bollocks.
Its about the same with Aquapol really - pictures designed to scare you into thinking you have a problem, then trying to introduce a convincing scientific method that makes them look professional despite the fact that they have spent the early part of the quote talking about rising damp - that's never been shown to exist in a laboratory anyway!
So now they proudly told the client that "The Aquapol system also performs a horizontal DPC function and will protect the building from rising damp for many years to come (25 years guaranteed, about 100 years estimated operational lifespan). No other horizontal DPC is needed" - and "The AQUAPOL masonry dehydration system is the latest development in wall drying technology. The heart of the system is a small, lampshade-like device, which is professionally installed onto the ceiling of the ground floor or basement. The device uses some of Earth’s naturally occurring energy to power itself and to dry out the building. The system works for both rising damp as well as laterally penetrating damp (e.g. for rooms or cellars situated underground)."
The AQUAPOL system has received many awards worldwide, such as the Honorary Award of the Austrian Ministry of Science, the prestigious Kaplan medal (the highest distinction in Austria for a scientific invention) and the Architecture Award of the City of Prague, just to name a few.
The last people to claim all sorts of weird European medals and dorky awards were the Holland and Schjriver damp proofing systems - totally discredited, with no scientific basis for their existence either. I've not managed to confirm any of those awards by the way - the Austrians have never heard of them. We've searched the Austrian Ministry of Science records and Kaplan Medal is never mentioned.
Aha!
Please see below the pricing for dehydrating the building using the Aquapol system:
Full building dehydration services with the Aquapol building dehydration system. Full building survey and moisture diagnosis Professional installation of the Aquapol system Long-term monitoring of the dehydration with regular follow-up moisture checks (up to 3-years or until the building is free of rising damp)
£ 5,426
Show discount. Customer receives a special discount in exchange for reference purposes and/or pictures/video documentation of the dehydration process.
-£ 813 Total £ 4,613 Payment 1: After installation £ 2,306
Payment 2: Six months later £ 2,307
Prices exclude VAT.
This includes the medium sized system which can cover the whole building. The outcome of the Aquapol system is a building permanently free of rising damp.
Ah - well - as with the other damp wallies, there's always a few little hidden phrases:
Freestanding walls: Aquapol UK guarantees that all freestanding (above ground level) walls within the active range of the device will dry out and reach air-dry state within the specified time period, assuming all other moisture sources (e.g. leaks) interfering with the dehydration process, have been rectified.
.... so the client has to rectify all the problems first - and that includes high ground levels, leaks, penetrating damp, and lack of ventilation...
So.. WHY THE HELL IS HE BUYING A MAGNET?
There's more:
The following cases are excluded from the money-back guarantee:
- Damp patches on the surface of plaster/walls as a result of using incorrect plaster or building materials, or incorrect renovation procedures (e.g. skimming, dot & dab etc.)
- Damp patches on the surface due to the presence of hygroscopic salts
- The client has changed its mind
Once the wall fabric has reached air-dry state and the building became dry, the money-back guarantee stops and it will be replaced by the 25-year functional warranty.
Ah - so impervious materials like gypsum plaster and cement are excluded then - so if he has cement, gypsum, dot and dab, skim walls it doesn't apply - so that means he needs to rectify those first and lime plaster - which is what he needs to do anyway to get the walls dry,
So.. WHY THE HELL IS HE BUYING A BLOODY MAGNET?
Oh my God - they do a what? An ELECTROSMOG survey..... Yup folks, pick yerselves off the floor - they check there's nothing that will interfere with their Bloody Magnet.
And right at the end, they proudly claim to be a Trustmark registered company - erm... you mean Trustmark that's got the head of the damp industry Property Care Association on its board of Directors? I took the liberty to contact Trustmark, and they tell me that neither Aquapol or Core Conservation are Members of Trustmark.
I also noted the Federation of Master Builders logo on the report - According to the FMB, they are not Members of the FMB either.
So - to summarise - Aquapol will apparently survey your house for a phenomenon that doesn't exist, flog you a very expensive 'system' - thats a 'magic lampshade' (not my description - thats what the folk at Historic Environment Scotland and Historic England call it ) - and won't guarantee its working unless you remove all the things that cause moisture retention in your home, like gypsum, cement, plastic paint, high ground levels, leaky gutters, etc etc - you know - all these things that cost you nothing to fix, and will avoid your having to spend £5,000 PLUS vat on a BLOODY MAGNET!
The client didn't buy the magic lampshade, and I gather he got the local plasterer to sort out a few bits of plastering and ventilation that stopped the problem. He only contacted me for help with sorting out the damp areas after he'd been quoted by aquapol.
I leave it to you to decide whether you'd call this a scam, a fraud, a technical nightmare or something else...
There's some serious scientists out there who have looked at this rubbish and if you want to see some videos of the crackpot that 'invented' this, have a look at this forum. Interestingly there are some great videos, which absolutely flatten the concept. The inventor is some sort of crackpot religious fanatic too - scientologist... !
I hope you have a really good laugh at this stuff - it would be funny if these fraudsters werent actually selling many thousands of pounds worth of this crap to unsuspecting home owners in Europe, and probably the UK
AND - I CANNOT believe that the IHBC - the Institute of Historic Building Conservation has actually got a senior Member to review and support this garbage - just goes to show how low the IHBC has sunk - they are hardly a viable Conservation movement any more.
Apparently, "Rising damp is a common problem in Scotland. Old stone buildings have no damp proof course and they can become damp and cold"
I've never heard such a load of rubbish in my life
Apparently the following symptoms observed in the cellar or ground floor mean you have rising damp.