Storing bikes in garage?
 

Hello, I have moved to a house where I finally have a garage to store and repair my bikes.

The problem is that although the house has been renovated, the garage is not in the best shape. At the moment, when it rains, a couple of walls develop some wet spots. It's not like there's water pouring from the wall, it's just that if you touch it you can feel it's wet.

I'm looking for the origin of the issue, but it involves a neighbour, as my wall is in his garden, and he's not really what one would call friendly, so it'll probably be a long process until I can fully solve it.

Temperatures in the garage are between 10 to 15°C and humidity is around 70 to 75%.

Is this going to cause damage to my bikes?

Mold can be tough to get rid of once it has set in. I'd get a dehumidifier so that you can at least avoid saturation after rain storms.

Mold may not be good for the garage but it won't hurt your bikes. I'd try to store them off the ground if you can, say hung on hooks from the top tubes or from the rims upside down (if you don't have hydraulic disc brakes).

They're hanging from the wall from the front wheel. Ground is dry though. The walls are the issue.

The garage is 75m2. I think I'll need a huge dehumidifier for that. I have one that I use in the cellar. Maybe I'll try it in the garage.

in portland we can have days or weeks of 99% humidity in the winter. the only problem is on our tandem after a rain ride the chain may not dry out and will rust. sometimes the floor gets water on it. not been a problem but for the chain.

I always keep the chain lubed. If it's wet when I get home, I degrease and dry it, and apply some oil before storing the bike.

I was more worried about the expensive Fox fork to be honest.

yes but it is often dark and raining and no room in the garage to do it I do it outside the garage on a stand. its a mid drive bike so you can peddle backwards on it. but it would still be hard to see what's going on. this year I may hit the chain with the leaf blower to knock the water off it and I am trying Boeshield t 9 see if it lasts after a rain ride.

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...if the lowest temps you get in there are 10*C, You might get a little condensation, but it will be minimal, even at those relative humidities.

Given your description, I think I'd be more inclined to regularly ventilate the garage, maybe even install a large fan blower in the wall or window, and regularly leave the door open about 6 inches at the bottom, unless you're in a place where you are worried about the people walking past trying to break in.

Those are about the winter weather conditions here where I live in California, and I have a garage full of bikes that do fine.

I do share your concerns about what is happening to that wall where the water is intruding.

it is a lot better nowadays what with sealed hubs, bottom bracket, headset, if your bike is so equipped. just lube the chain good and you should be good to go. and maybe the brakes might want a good dose of something also which will require a little R and R wrenching. (remove and replace, not recreational wrenching although i find working on my bike to be almost theraputical. (sp)

tires probably like it out there as opposed to a heated room, i keep tubes and tires stored in that cold damp garage up here in the PNW where humidity never drops below 78.5%.

The garage is ventilated by an unused chimney that was left open precisely for this reason. I have checked and so far I haven't seen any condensation on the bikes. However, I hanged them on the wall by the front wheel in summer using hooks, and when it started raining a few weeks ago, one of the humid spots appeared below the hooks. As I said it just feels humid to the touch. There's no water dripping or even reaching the floor, and nothing more than the back tire of one of the bikes is touching the humid part of the wall.

It seems that before I bought the house, the neighbour built a wall in his patio against my garage wall, but it doesn't reach the top of my wall and water filtrates between them. It doesn't help that the garage is not really well built and is totally uninsulated. Since the house was unhinhabited at that moment, nobody complained. It's not the friendliest of neighbours, so I don't have faith that it will be resolved quickly.

If you have leather saddles with copper rivets, the high humidity will cause the rivets to turn green. This is from experience with a damp basement (now I have a dehumidifier). The rivets will polish out nicely if it does happen.

First of all, I would get a dehumidifier as others have stated.

Then I would get the property deed plans to see if the neighbor built onto your land. You stated he built a wall touching your wall.**********

This is wrong for so many reasons.

Once you have the property plan showing the property line , then you can take action.

Being nice of course. Nobody likes to take down a wall, or any other construction they think is ok.

Check with your city/town you live in as well. Where I live, there has to be at least 6 feet away from property unless approved by neighbor.

This could be quite a process.....but in the meantime....get a BIG dehumidifier !!!

Good Luck

Probably. Eventually.

I'd stop the source of the moisture intruding. Without that, you'll have very moist water vapor all throughout that space. And it'll settle on the components, bolts, etc. Eventually rusting. No way around that, unless stopping the intrusion. Which would take shoring-up the porous walls, of course.

Sounds like a garage re-wrap & re-slatting is in order. Spring's coming up, and with it neighborhood barbecues. Perhaps the neighbor's icy exterior will thaw a bit, sufficient to allow the problem to get dealt with properly.

My house is built between 2 other houses. So I share 2 walls with 2 different neighbours. The patios were separated by a low wall, but at some time the previous owner of my house, made his half of the wall taller and built a garage and left ugly bricks visible on the outside of the neighbour patio. My neighbour, when he got tired of the ugly sight, built a parallel wall against these bricks on his patio and made it more aesthetically pleasing. Problem is that this wall doesn't reach the top of my wall and seems it's not well sealed against it (or sealing has degraded over time, IDK as I've only been living here for 4 months), so water is flowing between both walls. Not a huge problem for him, as his wall is outside, but as I've said, on my side there's the garage.

I have a dehumidifier that I sometimes use on the cellar when humidity gets too high there, but the cellar is 25m2 and is not ventilated. The garage has some ventilation through a unused chimney, but it's 75m2, so I would need a beast of a dehumidifier and, since it's not really insulated, I think I'll be fighting against the impossible.

Does the patio wall come into contact with your garage? If there is a gap the patio wall probably doesn't have much to do with the moisture. Does water pool up between the two? I would be concerned about drainage You would eventually have wood rot on the exterior siding if there is inadequate drainage, then rot at the sill plate, then rot at the base of the studs.

Im wondering if you have a roof or siding slow leak. Even just an ounce of water in a slow drip can cause the circumstance that you mention.

Well, the problem is that first I have to convince the neighbour that there's a problem, and that he has something to do with it. Hope that he's more receptive about it than he was about my heat pump that sits 15m away from his house (apparently the noise bothered him even before it was electrically connected to anything).

To be honest, I'm willing to pay the repair cost to avoid conflict, as I have a quite clear idea of where the problem is and how to solve it and it's not really expensive to do. The problem is that I have to do it from his patio... so it seems to me the situation won't be solved this winter. Maybe the next...

No wood here. I don't live in the USA. Houses are built with bricks here :lol:

Jokes aside, I'm more worried about reinforced concrete beams rusting, but so far the wet spots appear below them, so my more immediate concern are my bikes,

The roof over the garage was rebuilt when we renovated the house as it had leaks. It was leak tested by inundating it and it worked, so the problem is not the roof.

Building water issues need to mostly be handled by proper drainage. Regrading to divert, French drains, gutters and downspouts. Given your space constraints probably one of your likely methods would be a French drain on that side, possibly draining to a dry well as well as gutters.

If the soil on the outside is not below the slab level of the garage by a a few inches or several centimeters then moisture will probably be a problem if there aren't any waterproofing measures taken on the outside of the brick from the soil line down.

Your neighbor doesn't have a sprinkler that keeps your wall wet when they water their garden do they?

you will need an awfully big and powerful "dehumidifier" to reduce the relative humidity of the entire planet

maybe an exhaust fan in the garage to keep air moving and depend on evaporation would be more practical

/markp

I lived in Spain in the 1970s stationed there in the military. We lived off base and I can understand the moisture problems with masonry; we had some in the apartment building we lived in.
The main thing is air circulation. I would get a medium sized, say 600 mm, box fan and just have it running in the garage. As long as the air is moving things will stay dry or dryer. The chimney will help a lot in allowing humidity to escape. Where I live now we get periods of freezing weather followed by a warm front that moves in. When everything in my garage is freezing cold when the warm air moves in the stuff will sweat. Having a fan moving air keeps stuff dry and sweat free. Keeping bikes clean and polished greatly reduces corrosion.

You could check with city or municipal codes on walls, setback, easement rules that it seems the neighbor may have violated.

...if you think that this intersection between his short wall, and your taller garage wall is the source of your moisture issue, is there anything preventing you from extending your roof overhang on that side ? You can extend it far enough by tying onto the existing rafters. It will cost you some money, but I think you'll have trouble getting an uncooperative neighbor to tear down an existing "improvement".

Otherwise, you might be able to work out a slanted watershed structure that runs along the top of his wall and ties into your garage wall, which would probably be easier to build, because you don't have to do it up on ladders. But I really think you can improve your situation a lot with a blower in there somewhere. The chimney alone is not enough, unless you have some sort of intake opening down low, like vents in the bottom of one wall, or locking the garage door in place with a small 4" gap between the bottom of it and the ground.

A few pics would be nice, but if you have brick and water is getting on the brick, then you are going have problems, because it is drying from the outside to the inside of your garage. 75% humidity is going to become a problem for any metal sitting out there in it after a few years.
I would seal the wall as best you can to stop the water penetration. Then maintain it on a schedule. Maybe eventualy come up with a plan to resolve the water issue (where does the water go when it gets to the bottom of the wall?). Next seal the garage as best you can, including chimney, Avoid open holes to the outside. Avoid any insulation that is a vapor barrier. Unless you spray foam the back of your brick or bebuild your walls with vapor barrier on the outside, don't try to control the vapor, without proper drying, that is when mold builds, along with organic material. I think sealing off outright holes and the chimney is good, maybe adding non-vapor barrier insulation to areas that need it and DO NOT GET MOIST, then you can run a dehumidifier without attempting to dehumidify the outside world all the time.

re: water penetration, call a specialist & get a professional opinion about your options & potential costs

for example, one in our area, that we use is:

Basement Waterproofing Systems For Wet Basements | B-Dry.com