Did anyone deal with Kenwood damp proofing?

Findingtruth

gavinh1175 wrote: »

We are selling our house & our buyer's homebuyer survey picked up damp. Their mortgage company instructed them to seek advice from a PCA accredited firm & have any recommended repairs carred out. Mortgage company won't release the mortgage funds until works have been carried out.

Well I got my mortgage with HSBC even it showed in the survey there are damp issues with the property. Completed in Feb. After moving in and tripped some wall papers I found massive damp in every room.Quite worried how am I going to get this treated and how much it is going to cost. Kenwood sent one guy to check the damp today, I will get a report tomorrow.

Findingtruth

Thanks very much.
Very smart.
I hope people like davemorrris get punished for lying
I could not quote your post as there are links in it and I have just registered.

Findingtruth

Lone_Ranger_1982 wrote: »

I moved into my house at the tail-end of 2012. The home buyers report identified some areas of damp and urged that we bring in a specialist damp company. At the estate agents' recommendation, I enlisted kenwood; worst mistake I have ever made.

Their initial survey missed approx 50% of the overall damp in the house. When challenged on this, their senior management suggested that the damp had materialised in the time between the first survey and the subsequent one. Lies.

They were constantly late to turn up. They took little care of my property and damaged door frames and my fire place. Their management are rude and aggressive and even resorted to blackmail on the basis that THEIR staff had used kenwood cement to do some additional work on my property.

After less than three months, I now have a massive line of damp in one of the walls they worked on. The company are telling me that its my fault for using the wrong type of paint, despite using a paint type that was not listed on their contract as types that should not be used. Three other independent surveyors have said that it is clearly a case of kenwood not having taken the damp proofing high enough on the wall. Kenwood are once again lying.

This company is the worst company I have ever had to deal with. They are nothing short of a disgrace and I will be asking the PCA to come to my property to review the overall standard of their work.

Disgusted.

I moved in my flat last month. Kenwood surveyed my property this morning and I did not feel particularly happy with the man as he was not interested in listening to me telling him which areas are showing damp. After reading all the posts, I have decided to get a independent damp suveyor to come investigate where the damp comes from before I get anyone to work on the walls. Possibly I will not use kenwood. I thought they are a well know big company which should be more professional than unqualified builders. Looks like I might be wrong. AN experienced builder could do the same job

harram

I have a flat that was treated for damp by kenwood about 12 years ago. they offer a 30 year guarantee, and I have a re-occurence of damp in areas that have were treated by them. First up they ask for £150 to even consider your looking at your claim, and now, I have just received their report saying although the problem is in the walls that they treated, it is "above the line of the original treatment" and is due to "salt contamination" rather than damp. They have "kindly" offered to fix it for £580 and have not mentioned the £150 I have already paid.

I have taken photos which clearly refute their claims - I am hopeful that this report is just their standard mode of operating, thinking that most people will shell out £500 odd quid to have it fixed.

I am pretty angry at their default attempt to try and not honour their guarantee though, but before casting judgement I'll see how they respond to my letter which threatened to report them to the office of fair trading.

Will keep you posted.

bouicca21

There is a (penetrating) damp patch at the bottom corner of a window in the flat that I rent. The letting agent and the management company both sent damp surveyors. The man from Kenwood stuck his head out of the window and identified a damp patch on the outside of the wall caused by faulty gutters. Strangely, neither I nor anyone else could see such a patch. He didn't bother putting his damp meter any where but in the most obviously damp spot, so he didn't notice (as the other guy did) that the wall is totally dry until about half way down the window. So we have 'fix the gutters' versus 'it's going to be very difficult to absolutely sure of the true cause of the damp but it is most likely that it is getting in between the wall and the window frame'. I know which I believe to be most likely.

Saver1983

I would advise strongly against using this company. They were rude and kept me waiting every time I was due to see them. They told me the work would take 1-1 and a half days to complete the work and they were still in my house 5 days later. They cut the power to my boiler when I was 7 months pregnant and kindly poured cement in my flower beds when the work was complete! So unprofessional, please avoid this company!!!

[Deleted User]

Very grateful for this thread. I had Kenwood booked in to do a timber survey for me next week but I am now cancelling!

mav121

AVOID kenwood! DONT GO NEAR THEM.

Pay for an INDEPENDENT DAMP SURVEYOR to diagnose the problem.

Then get a SEPERATE BUILDER who is not connected to the surveyor - who will then be instructed by the damp surveyor on the type of work needed to fix the damp problem. This way you are only paying for whats needed to fix the problem.

Theres NO self interest in diagnosing loads of works that UN-NEEDED.

Common sense - but unfortunately i spent alot of money before this dawned.

Oh well.

Goodluck

When_It_Rains

Just in case anyone else is searching for info on Kenwood Damp Proofing, I thought I'd put this up. We used them recently for what was meant to be a simple one-day damp job in our house and they were terrible.

During the job, they drilled into a gas pipe in the wall and caused a massive gas leak. Fair enough, the pipe was behind a wall, but then they sent someone out to fix it and had to come back the next day to finish the job they'd started, so I had to take a day off work for that. And the guy hadn't fixed it properly! Throughout the following week, we kept thinking we could smell gas, so bought a gas alarm, which went off when we turned it on. The National Grid came out, said it was 'immediately dangerous' and shut off the gas supply to our house - so we were without central heating or hot water all weekend.

Their plumber came out on the Monday (another day off work for me) and had to drill back into the wall to get to the pipe to replace the damaged bit. Finally, no leak. Kenwood was then booked in to come back to fill in the hole and re-plaster, etc, a couple of weeks later, but they didn't turn up for their appointment. My wife took the day off work to sit there waiting for them, and kept getting told they were '20 minutes' away or 'just six miles away'. Two hours later, she was put through to the manager, who told her she was 'giving me earache' – after she was the one who'd been being lied to (or, at best, misinformed) on the phone for the past few hours.

So I then had to take another day off work two days later in order for them to actually come and finish the job off.

For what was meant to be a one-day job (and not a cheap one, either!) this was appalling service. They seemed to have no sense of the seriousness of the gas leak they’d caused – and little interest, either. And the lack of customer care was astounding - you'd expect more from managerial staff. From the gas leak to the missed appointment, no one apologised to us for any of it until I suggested to their head of customer services that it might be nice to hear an apology from someone. They say they will pay the expenses incurred from us having to eat out over the weekend when we had no gas, but they won't compensate us for the four extra unpaid holiday days my wife and I had to take off between us while they got their act together and finished the job.

Really got the sense they wanted to take the money and run in the first place, and couldn't have cared less about how they left the house - or treated us as customers. We'd had them recommended to us by the estate agents that sold the house to us, who are good guys that we also used to rent from before we bought, so we've always had a good relationship with them. When they heard of all this, they said they were also going to steer clear of Kenwood in the future. Anyone else looking for damp work at this time of year, look elsewhere!

katejo

I have used them twice without any problem though it was a few years ago (8 years and 19 years)