How well do you understand water vapor movement, or permeance, as it relates to structural drying?
Permeance is essentially the speed limit at which water moves through a material. Through very porous materials like carpet, it moves quickly, and therefore dry time is short. For other materials, like concrete, movement is much slower – and therefore, dry time is longer.
In this episode of When It Comes Down To It, Chuck Boutall explains the concept of permeance, offers some resources for calculating a surface’s permeance, and discusses why this concept is vital to the restoration and drying process.