Tracking moisture risk over time
How to track moisture risk over time for a property: re-score after anything that changes the record, and log indoor humidity continuously. The building changes faster than the climate does.
Step by step
Take a baseline and keep it
Score the property once and save the report with its date and model version. Everything afterwards is a comparison, and a comparison needs a fixed point. Without it, a later score is a number with nothing to be better or worse than.
Log indoor humidity, not just spot readings
A hygrometer read when you happen to walk past tells you about that moment. A logging sensor in a basement and one upstairs, left for a season, tells you how often the building spends time above 60% and for how long — which is the persistence that actually decides whether anything grows.
Re-score after anything the record will have learned
A disclosure uploaded. A construction year confirmed from a parcel record where it had been estimated from a neighbourhood median. A remediation completed with a scope and an independent clearance. Each of these changes what the model knows, and the last one can lift an evidence floor that was holding the score up.
Re-score after work the record will not learn
Regrading, a new drain, a replaced roof, ventilation added. None of these reliably reach a public record, which is why a well-maintained property in a vulnerable category keeps scoring as its category. Supply the documentation and re-run it, or the improvement stays invisible.
Compare within a model version, not across
Every score carries the version of the model that produced it. When the model is retuned, an old and a new score are not directly comparable — the difference may be the building or may be the weights. Recompute the baseline against the current version before reading a change as improvement.
Watch the drivers, not the number
A score moving from 58 to 54 means very little. A driver disappearing from the list — an unresolved disclosure event becoming resolved — means a great deal, and it will often move the number less than you expect because the floor it was imposing was doing the work quietly.
What changes quickly and what does not
Regional moisture burden barely moves. Climate normals are thirty-year averages and shift over decades; the 20 points it carries are effectively a constant for the life of an ownership.
Terrain does not move at all, though what you do with water on the site does — and that part is not in the terrain module, it shows up in whether anything gets documented.
Building vulnerability moves only when the building does, or when a record is corrected. The largest single-step change available to most properties is a construction year going from estimated to verified.
Disclosure and event history is the volatile one, and it is the largest module. A new event added, or an existing one resolved and documented, is where real movement lives.
What a sensible monitoring cadence looks like
Continuous for indoor humidity, because that is cheap and it is the only signal that catches a developing problem before anything is visible.
Seasonally for the building itself: a perimeter walk after heavy rain in autumn, a look at the basement at the end of winter, gutters checked before and after leaf fall. All of it free, and between them they cover the failure modes that account for most residential water.
Annually, or on any material change, for the score. More often than that is measuring the same records twice.
Questions people ask
- How often should I re-score?
- On a material change — a disclosure, a verified construction year, a completed remediation — and otherwise annually. Re-running it monthly reads the same records again and tells you nothing.
- My score went up and I have not done anything. Why?
- Either new information reached a record the model reads, or the model version changed. The version is stored with every score, which is the first thing to check.
- Does a lower score prove the work succeeded?
- No. It shows the record now reflects the work. Whether the water actually stopped is what an independent clearance and a season of humidity logs tell you.