Overnight we had quite a bit of rain. It didn’t seem to rain hard but it was drifting rain being blown all over by the wind, coming, as usual, from a south-westerly direction.
This morning we awoke to see something we’d not seen since July 2008, when we first saw water coming through the walls and windows of our Oxley Woods eco house… Water half way down the wall in our bedroom on the top floor.
Apparently this is caused by water coming in through the high level window above, making its way down behind the plasterboard until it hits something (a horizontal join or wood) when it pools and seeps through the wall. The water mark was quite big, about the size of my hand, but it did dry fairly quickly in the sun that followed.
This window has been “fixed” previously, and as I stated earlier we’ve not seen water on this wall for over a year. This just goes to show the on/off hit and miss nature of both the fault(s) with the design and/or construction here and the fixes which have been applied so far.
The holes in bedroom four (top floor) were also soaked through the wood and plasterboard this morning, but all other places where we’ve seen water in the past seemed to be dry to the eye and touch.
It’s interesting to see your chronicle of events over the past months. I was thinking about viewing one of the houses on the estate, do you recommend this or not? Do you think that you just got the “dud” house of the batch????
chaz
It’s hard to say what the real overall situation is.
The people from Wood Newton and George Wimpey will only say so much, and they do sometimes contradict one another. We know that several other houses have had leaks (although apparently less than us, we know this because the neighbours have told us first hand, and also Wimpey and Wood Newton people have admitted as much too.
There have been three revisions of the windows on site. We have had, thus far, no official explanation for the third revision.
The first revision apparently suffered from warping (not in all cases, but could happen) and this is why the second revision (like ours) was introduced, part of their continuous improvement programme.
The third revision, as far as we can see from a brief visual inspection, removes the risk of most of the issues we’ve had. The sill, the setting for the friction joints, the joins in corners, have all been revised. BUT, this change happened BEFORE they finished diagnosing our problems. So that begs the question did someone at the architects and/or builders KNOW there was a risk of these issues, or did they change these elements for another, unknown reason? It doesn’t look like cost cutting. I know which I feel is most likely, but I have no direct proof or quotes to back up my own personal views on that one.
The first thing they did when we had leaks was to apply filler to the sill joints. This has now been shown to be one of the most serious problem areas on our windows. Both Wood Newton and George Wimpey reps on site have seemed surprised by this. But if this is such a shocker, then why was this the first area they looked at over a year ago?
The lack of flash banding around the windows seems to be a more common problem. We’ve seen this being retrofitted around the site to houses from both what I would call “phase one” and “phase two” of the development. All of the most recent builds (with the third, single piece window sill design) have had the flash banding installed during construction. Again, this seems like a common sense thing to do, and a fairly serious oversight which could affect all houses without flash banding.
The other thing that concerns us is our MOST leaky window never showed any signs of water ingress. It only manifested itself in the room below (the kitchen). If the ground floor windows were affected in the same way, or the bathroom windows where the walls are covered ceiling to bath in panelling, you would probably never see any evidence of the water ingress.
All that said, I would recommend checking the houses out, I hope this site is useful and helps people like yourself go in “eyes open”, if we had seen a blog like this we’d have still been looking, but knowledge can be power and hopefully you’ll be better informed with regards what to look out for. We certainly seem to have had the worse problems, but we’re far from the only one to have these, or related, problems.
If you’re going for one of the more recently built houses with no sill join then I can’t think of anything specifically for you to be concerned about, but I’m no expert, just someone who’s nosey by nature and has a vested interest in trying to keep an eye on what’s going on on the building site!