Core Conservation is this a scam?

Important - Scroll down to see the latest about this scammer - and a German TV expose of the scam, together with a German property science website that also investigated them. The Aquapol company was taken to court in Germany by the government there, for false advertising and fraud - and they were convincingly found guilty.

I have published a lot of detail about Aquapol over the years - on facebook, on twitter, and now here.  The survey industry keep chasing them up and down the country, making sure to document all their activity and their new company names. I understand they have upset the Property Care Association - who are the official damp industry organisation in this country. There's a Twitter handle @aquapolscam - which is a site I understand that was set up by a chap whose elderly parents were scammed to the tune of well over £4,000.   

I am well informed that Historic England have investigated them and will have nothing to do with them - more on this later.  I am also reliably informed that they have been thrown out of the Listed Property Owners Show, after one of the most important sponsors, Historic England, and Historic Environment Scotland, refused to share the show with them and asked them to leave. I'm told reliably that the show organisers were given an ultimatum - us or them.

Their modus operandi is simple:  Create the impression they know all about conservation. Use the word Conservation all over the website.  Talk about breathability. Talk about lime plaster, lime render. Use all the things we talk about on our sites - talk about moisture being the biggest cause of deterioration of building fabric. Talk about diagnosis of damp problems... They use my favourite word - holistic - because that's what surveyors do when they assess a building for moisture issues.

But then they try to sell you a bloody magnetic lampshade. (That's not my description by the way - one of the Technical boffins at Historic England came up with it, and its how they now refer to it)

About Val Juhaz: How I met the guy, and how he used me...

All of this builds a picture for you, the innocent home owner, of a company that knows what it is doing.  It doesn't.  Most of what is on their website site is copied from my site. O know this because when they started, they had nothing but a magic lampshade. Then they found me .  Anything that isn't copied from me, is copied from other similar professionally run businesses.  The bloke that runs this show is called Val Juhaz.  He came to me a few years ago and told me he wanted to get into the conservation game in the UK, and asked for my help. Now at that time, I clearly had no idea who he was, or what he did. So I spent many hours on the phone to this Val Juhaz, talking about damp in houses, and moisture, and the fraud of rising damp, which is well established in the media. I told him where to go for information, which organisations to be a part of if he was to get into the conservation game. He was strangely insistent. He kept ringing me and asking questions. Then he started to ask to come and see me. Still no alarm bells rang. I didnt realise at the time that I was being used - the guy was extracting every bit of knowledge about the damp industry I could offer, and learning about my scientific approach to rising damp - not to understand how to properly diagnose moisture problems, but how to get round the rising damp - how to claim it existed. Finally he admitted that he had a company called Core Conservation, and was going to cure peoples damp problems for them. One day he turned up at my house, and spent the entire day digging information out of me - I realise now that I wasted a lot of valuable time and effort, talking to someone who was literally sucking information out of me, and trying to find out how I approached the whole rising damp scam. I have to admit I started to feel a little threatened by this bloke.  He asked if he could look at the worst case of damp that I'd ever encountered, and show that he could cure it. I thought long and hard about this, knowing full well that he could meet clients, and upset them - and decided that privacy and data protection would never allow me to introduce him to clients anyway. Any damp issues clients had were long ago solved and could not be improved on - its not complicated to take plaster off walls or lower ground levels - or fit ventilation.  I jokingly told him that I had a wet cellar, and he said he'd like to cure my wet cellar.  Rather unwillingly, I said he could have a look.

A few days later he and his co-conspirator turned up. To my amusement, they appeared carrying a white object that they said was magnetic and would cure the damp in my cellar. Now the damp in my cellar is there because the walls are well below ground. In very wet clays. With a steep bank behind the house. And at the time, there wasnt very good ventilation. And the cellar had been painted years ago with cellar paint. So -  its a wet, painted, unventilated cellar with poor drainage.  So in they went. These two guys spent all day fiddling around in my cellar, and fitting this magic lampshade to the ceiling in there. They told me that it would immediately start to dry my cellar out. It was an amazing piece of scientific technology - very expensive to make - but it didn't need power, because it worked by using the earth's magnetic field. They took lots of samples of the walls - didnt actually show me the samples - which I thought interesting, seeing as it was my house, and I'm supposed to know all about damp walls - but they did drill holes, and take samples.  One of the most amusing episodes was when one of them wandered through the house carrying what he called an 'Electro Smog Meter' - a funny yellow thing with a big silver ball on the end of it - and took lots of readings via a flickering needle that seemed to sway backwards and forwards. Apparently our houses are full of Electro Smog - and it is this that makes them damp. When the earths magnetic field works, your house is dry - but this Electro Smog gets in the way of the magnetic field  and makes water rise. (Seriously - this is honest truth - and what they told me).  OK - so this thing apparently inntercepts the magnetic wavesx that roll through our houses, and somehow straighten them out, making the wdater that is rising in my walls all of a sudden turn around and go back to the earths core. It came from there you see, and magnetism holds it there until we interfere with that magnetism, via the medium of Electro Smog.

Anyway, they finally finished walking around taking their electro smog readings, and put all their gadgets away - telling me that they would be able to show that the cellar would dry naturally without any further involvement from me.  So off they went. About this time I noticed that the Core Conservation website was now proudly showing my cellar as a case history of a 'damp cellar' that they had cured. This was about 6 months after the first visit, and numerous long phone calls from Val Juhaz who continued to 'stalk me' looking for information about conservation. He would ask me the best places to go and learn - which conferences, which shows, who to talk to about increasing his damp skills. By this stage I had smelled a rat anyway - and started to look at the whole circumstances surrounding this strange lampshade device. So to continue the cellar story - after about three or four months, I went down into the cellar and to my horror discovered that the ceiling joists were soaking wet, covered in mould, and the floor and walls were soaking wet - worse than I'd ever seen them. I'd totally forgotten about the lampshade by then - and started to look at how this poorly ventilated cellar could get some airflow. We decided to open up a hole at each end, and managed to periscope vent the ends, feed ing to an intake, out take ventilation fan made by Vapourflow Ltd, in Reading. Once the fans fired up, the cellar rapidly dried out - and the mould started to recede. The timbers had been quite badly damaged in places by fungal rot - a direct result of the claims that Aquapol, of Core Conservation made that their device would dry the cellar. After nearly a year, it was wetter than ever, and saved only by the ventilation fans we installed. I took masonry samples ( I measure moisture in % of wet weight) and walls that had been sampled by Core Conservation at around 8% (I checked the drill locations where they took samples and did my own) - and the walls were still at the same moisture content. 8% is not over the top but its enough to be a concern. After installing the ventilation system, these dropped quickly to around 4% and are still consistently around that level several years later.

The magic lampshade did nothing in all of the time it was in the cellar, and was eventually ripped out and opened up to reveal a bit of printed circuit board with strange spirals on it. I gave it to a friend who is an electrical engineer and he chuckled - 'It'll make a TV aerial'  was his only comment. Juhaz continued to stalk me - I heard he'd been thrown out of the Listed Property Show, then started to see twitter articles saying he had scammed people, and I've had numerous calls from other Chartered Surveyors who have investigated damp houses in which the 'magic lampshade' had been installed. In all these cases the houses were still wet, and the common thread of the stories was that the only thing needed was better ventilation and improvements to things like ground levels. Juhaz turned up at my house one night, demanding to be let into the house. I called the polica and he eventually left before they arrived. 

Since then, I've heard nothing more from him, until I got an email from the Advertising Standards Authority saying he was upset that I was apparently running him down and that was naughty. Apparently I'm advertising.  U'm not really sure WHAT I'm advertising - but clearly he's not a happy bunny.

I'm also reliably informed that Mr Juhazz is a Scientologist.  And has been for a long time.