Dryzone Moisture Meter Detector – Damp Meter for Wood, Masonry and Other Building Materials

Product Information

This meter may be used to detect ambient temperatures. It’s small, ergonomic and easy to utilise. It has accurate measurements for two different wood groups and five groups of building materials. This device has an auto shut down feature which works following five minutes of inactivity. With the use of its pins, it offers a measuring range of 5-50% for wood surfaces and 1.5-33% for building materials. With the pinless sensor, the range for both types of surfaces increases to 0-99.9%. It is powered by a single battery that comes with the product. Pros

How to use a moisture meter. Some of our electronic moisture meters being benchmarked in our damp diagnosis lab Bryan explains how the meters work and shows you some moisture ‘profiling’, which is where moisture meters really shine. This means that they can be used as a very useful tool for any surveyor, who may be trying to gain an insight into the causes of dampness. These meters can be a liability if used incorrectly, so it is essential that surveyors understand the limitations of them. That way they remain a positive tool, rather than a misleading one. It’s surprising how many surveyors don’t know how to use a moisture meter properly. This applies to residential surveyors and even specialist damp surveyors too. Bryan has made it a priority to help train users to make good decisions based on meter reading, rather than bad ones. The baseline value can also be considered as a goal to achieve as you begin to dry out the infected surfaces.

This meter is the first pinless product in this section. This product has a range of unique features and comes with the various benefits that a pinless meter offers including speed. This product is good for going over delicate surfaces. It's small and ergonomic. Does not provide as wide a range of measurements as compared to some of the other products on this list. In general, a reference scale goes from 0 to 100, where 0 is bone dry and 100 is saturated. But there are other moisture meters that have reference scales ranging from 0 to 300.

As a result, the normal moisture meter reading for these materials in between 0.5% and 1%. Higher values could mean a wet or saturated material. Generally speaking, moisture meters that are calibrated for wood offer a reading scale ranging from 6% to 40%. Does it mean that wood can not hold more moisture than 40%? No. As said earlier, wood has a great water-holding capacity and can have way more than 40% moisture content. Freshly cut wood, for example, can hold between 40% to 200% of damp in it. Quite impressive isn’t it? We will now look at an all-in-one device. This moisture meter type is designed to combine the benefits of the two aforementioned devices and sometimes a thermo-hygrometer too. If for example we have a wall with some damp stains. They could be patchy and ill-defined. In the video Bryan mentions ‘profiling’ the wall so that we get a better idea of the distribution of the moisture in it. This is great because in general the higher readings will be nearer the source of the moisture and the lesser readings well, further away. This is basic but very useful as an aid. Visual evidence is important, but the meter may sometimes show that the source of moisture doesn’t follow the stain pattern – very useful. Profiling is done to obtain the distribution and then compare that to what the surveyor sees; the type of construction; location; topography and other factors. A diagnosis can then be reached and will normally be accurate if, the surveyor has used his skill, judgement and equipment correctly. He should know how to use a moisture meter properly. Second, because it also has many applications and can be used for different purposes with different humidity tolerances.

Repeat this process several times on other areas of the surface. This will maximise the accuracy of your measurements by taking multiple readings and allowing you to find the average. This is best done on wood surfaces.

User Friendly, Easy to use - Moisture level indicated by numeric display, scale, and audio alerts signaling moisture above 20%, in building materials and 15% for wood. Ergonomic design provides great hand feeling. However, if you want to use a moisture meter as an aid to diagnosis of damp in masonry or plaster, remember that it is not calibrated for that material. It cannot be so because the wide variety of densities and materials is just too vast. Natural materials like stone can vary within a wall too. A wall is made up of the mortar, the masonry units and the plaster. Any profiling must be done in each separately; never mixed. You cannot compare qualitative readings from different materials. You must not rely on the meter to take quantitative readings. The numbers, colours or sounds refer to ‘relative’ amounts now. You can tell where moisture is present and how much more damp or, much less damp parts of a wall are. The readings are now qualitative. This is important! It is also very useful to a surveyor. This meter from Extech is the first all-in-one product to feature in this section. This product is lightweight and comes with the benefits of both a pin and pinless moisture meter. For this section, we will discuss the best moisture meter products on the market. We will look at the advantages of each of the products discussed, what design features they have, what tech features they have, their displays, their measure range, power source as well as list their pros and cons. General Tools MMD4E Moisture Meter Perversly this may mean that with rising damp for example, the readings may fall with height initially and then get higher, as a wall is profiled, just at the threshold of the rise. The readings may then plummetas you leave the salt contaminated zone. This is know as a ‘salt band’ and is an indicator of a potential rising damp problem. A salt band can manifest for other reasons, but these are well recognised by competent surveyors. Leaks, severe floor/wall junction condensation, salt damp on the faces of chimney breasts and low level penetrating damp, for example.A pin moisture meter uses pins instead of a pad (that a pinless meter uses). Other differences between these two types include that a pin meter can leave holes in the surface it is measuring, pin meters also require different setting adjustments than a pinless device and pin moisture meters also work slower than pinless meters.