Adobe house renovation

How sensitive is the loam?

How to renew it?

The use and renovation of adornments have their own rules. These should be taken seriously, as it may cause a rapid deterioration of the housing's structure if someone does not read it. The loam as building material is practically ground / clay ground. As straw, blend straw, chunks, chaff, etc.
Its blended vegetable fibers do not allow to settle down, disintegrating the material. We can say it is an ancient composite material.
The straw / effort strengthens, but the compressive strength is provided by the clay soil. As the loam is earthy material, it is easy to absorb the moisture, but it can easily be released.
This is the secret of the creek. In winter, when the air is dry, the walls bring the air to the room, and if the air is too humid, the adobe walls are closed.
Thus, humidity can be maintained throughout the year at an optimal range of 40-60%.
The problem starts if you get too much water / moisture on the wall and / or you can not take it. In this case, rotting, fungus,
Which let's do is not very healthy neither to us nor to the house. If the walls are completely overwhelmed, they can cause serious static problems, even if the building is tilted.
When making the loam, the brick (for masonry in solid walls) dries for weeks or months. If it is flushed, it will not dry out in 1-2 days.

Typical errors:

- Roofing: This will soon ruin the masonry. She wanders, screams, or even slopes. This should be terminated as soon as possible.
- Insufficient external plaster: The weather exposed wall will deteriorate rapidly. The worst is when the rain falls in the slightest wind (the prevailing wind is mostly in the north, so it is most typical of the northern walls)
- Running plants on the walls: This does not have to be explained too long. The wall is ultimately ground. The roots of the plants have nothing to do with it because it destroys it quickly.
- Landfill ground: No debris, waste, or land should be placed on the footpath, because it melts the masonry and falls.
- Damage / Lack of Lower Insulation: It may cause problems with houses without foundation and defective foundation. With some landscaping, the water must be drained from the walls. If the wall gets more moisture from the ground than it can give, sooner or later the wall will melt.
- Exterior paint / plaster: The loam can only deliver the moisture to its environment if it does not close its surface with vapor-abrasive materials. It is strictly forbidden to admix the walls with cement plaster. (The lower leg of the foot can be soiled outside by soaking rain from the ground). The cement does not allow the moisture to pass, so the water stays in the wall and accumulates.
The loam does not "like" cement, but lime is so. Paint is forbidden eg. Dispersion or enamel paint.
Apart from being inexpensive, the lime passes through the vapor, and even its strong alkalinity prevents the fungus!
It is a good idea to do the outside plastering with a mixture of lime and sand, and it is recommended to use reed fabrics as thermal insulation
(The reed is pervasive and does not tend to fungus, except for very high humidity - see old reptiles).

- Water pours on the wall: Unfortunately, I saw this in person. In the street beside us, the water flowed from the road to a wall of adobe. They did not dig in, the wall was not renewed and no attempt was made to renovate it (for example, we can not expect too much from an old woman). Over the years the wall was saturated with water, unfortunately there was no soil, which could have saved it in that state.
The movement of the loess in the area was just a foam on the cake ... It can be seen that the protruding part of the wall was standing by rainwater, which could not withstand the burden.
Finally, the local government bought and dismantled the life-threatening building. The road has been renewed and the ground water was drained with drainage pipes.

Concrete room: If a loft is traditionally made without bottom waterproofing (almost certainly in the 80's, before the 90's), the soil vapor from the soil can evaporate through walls and traditional floorboards.
If this system is roughly interrupted by pouring concrete floor in place of the floor, the vapor (since the cement is closed) can not get through the floor, so it will accumulate under the floor and get exhausted in the lower part of the walls. If the walls can not evaporate this, the walls are already watered, which may have been completely unknown to the house before the concrete was completed. There are several ways to do this.
One is that the wall is subsequently grounded and a waterproof layer is created above the ground 10-30 cm. This is also seamlessly bonded with the concrete floor insulation. This is of course the most expensive solution.
The other way is to get the room deeply digged and to fill the floor with a pebble (pebbles with large grain) and under the floor level under 30-50cm thickness and install ventilators under the floor eg. faláttöréssel. On the outer side of the wall there is also an artificial evaporation zone using a pebble and geotextile separator, but it does not matter if the eaves are wide enough to prevent rainfall. The gravel is not good in this place because it fills the space and can not peel the pebbles, but rather absorbs the water!

Solutions:

If the walls are moving, sinking, watering, the best solution is intermittent underfloorization. It's a pretty busy job and time consuming task.
To do this, first and foremost, a ditch will be excavated outside and inside the wall (hence the sub wall for concrete is accessible).
Roof beams should be relieved to support the wall part to be excavated.
Under the wall, the bases are expanded in 0.5-1 m sections and their location is paved. Repeat this every 3 meters (in case of 1m extraction)
If necessary, roof beams are supported over the expanded wall section (recommended).

The concrete has to be ironed, which must be connected when the sections are made. So it looks like it is being excavated under the wall for a 1 meter long, 2-meter skip, then again a 1-meter pit and so on. Logically, the house is made after three such steps, but it is necessary to wait for the binding time of the previous concrete. The width of the excavation must be determined by a static specialist because the different masonry units have different loads. If we are not sure whether the wall can withstand a 1-meter gap at the bottom, let's do 0.5-0.7-meter holes in 4 steps, just as someone's wall hangs. The expert's opinion is always justified.

Another solution to drain the vapor: the venting shaft (this can be outside or inside the wall, but it is more advisable to get a lot of water from the outside of the house). It is a small trench next to the wall, which is bricked on both sides with bricks, the two walls protruded to one another, so that it can not collapse, and between it a hollow section where the air can pass. Its operation is very simple: water does not get to the wall of the house, but only to the wall of the trench, and here the water evaporates through the ventilation. (It also evaporates on the brick wall on the side of the house). If you can not dig directly to the wall of the house due to the risk of a fall, you have to leave 1-2 meters and dig the ditch.

This method was used with old castles and cellars with great success. Ventilation shafts are often made of a size suitable for human transport. Obviously, for a family house, this is not necessary.

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