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Where is the water coming from?

Five questions about when the water appears, where it shows up and what the ground outside is doing. You will get back the causes your answers are consistent with and why, what to stop doing, and the one check that would settle it.

This tool does not diagnose your house, and it does not identify mold. It sorts what you describe into the patterns that behave that way, and tells you what to check next. If your answers include a horizontal crack, a bowed wall or floors that have started to slope, it stops and sends you to a licensed structural engineer — because at that point the water is no longer the headline.
Step 1 of 5 When does the water show up?

Timing is the single most useful clue, and it is free. It separates surface water from groundwater from plumbing.

What this tool will never tell you

It will not tell you that something is mold, because that is a sampling result and not an opinion formed from a description. It will not walk you through structural repair, or through excavating alongside a foundation that may already be compromised. It carries no prices, because what this work costs varies by region and by year and a stale figure is exactly what gets used against a homeowner. And it gives no insurance advice and no medical content at all — if your concern is health rather than the building, that is a conversation with a doctor and with your state or local health department.

Where a rule depends on where you live — crawl space ventilation, vapour barriers, sealed crawl spaces, sump discharge, radon — it says so and points you at your local building department rather than inventing a national answer.

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.