During the Monsoon

For anyone letting a property, the monsoon is the only period when rooms can be taken out of service without losing income. Refurbishment work that would be impossible to schedule in December is straightforward in August.

For homeowners, it is the season when you actually notice what is wrong. You see where the damp comes in, which rooms are dark, where the draught goes. Those observations are far more useful for specifying than a walkthrough in dry February.

Lead times also work in your favour. Specify in July, and the work lands in October when the house is reopening and the weather is good — which is exactly when you want it finished.

It helps to know how extreme the conditions are. In a normal year roughly nine-tenths of Goa's rain falls between June and September, and July alone brings about a third of the annual total, with rain on around 27 days of the month. The sky is heavily clouded for much of the season.

Humidity is the figure that matters for fabric. Morning relative humidity in the state capital runs at 91 per cent in July, August and September, and afternoons rarely fall below the low eighties. Guidance from the US Environmental Protection Agency is to keep indoor humidity below 60 per cent, because condensation and mould become likely above it.

In other words, the ordinary monsoon air of a Goan house is well past every threshold at which mould is expected to grow. That is not a fault in any particular building. It is the baseline, and the aim is to stop moisture settling in any one place long enough for growth to take hold.

Not every mark on a curtain in August is mildew, and the fix depends on the cause. Mildew shows as clusters of small grey, black or greenish spots, often on the wall side first, and it usually smells. It is a symptom of stagnant damp air rather than of water arriving from somewhere.

A tide-mark or brown stain with a defined edge points to liquid water. Check the window frame above it and the wall beside it. Wind-driven rain in July arrives mostly from the west and south-west, off the sea, and it finds gaps in frames, sills and old putty that stay dry for the rest of the year.

Damp running down the inside of the glass on a cool morning is condensation, most common in air-conditioned bedrooms where cold glass meets humid air. It soaks the leading edge and the hem of any curtain resting against it. Pulling the curtain a few centimetres clear of the glass is often enough.

Ceiling fans are the first line of defence because they move air across fabric without changing the humidity. On their own they cannot dry a room in saturated weather, but they stop the thin layer of still, wet air that forms against curtains and upholstery, which is where growth begins.

Air conditioning removes moisture as a side effect of cooling, and many units have a dry mode that does this at lower power. In a room used through the monsoon, running it for a few hours a day makes a real difference to the fabric. The trade-off is electricity, and a large house running several units will notice it.

A standalone dehumidifier works well in a closed room such as a storeroom where curtains and cushions are being kept for the season. It needs the door and windows shut to be effective, and someone to empty it unless it drains to a sink or outlet. In an open room it is working against the whole monsoon.

The monsoon is the only season in which a leaking window is visible, so it is the season to find them. Walk the house during heavy rain with the wind blowing onshore and look at the sill, the bottom corners of the frame and the wall directly below. Photograph anything wet, because it will have dried and vanished by October.

A curtain hanging in front of a leaking window acts as a wick. It draws water up from a wet sill, holds it against the wall and hides the problem until the fabric is stained. Hooking that curtain back for the season, or tying it clear of the sill, protects both the fabric and your ability to see what is happening.

For windows that will always take some weather, such as an exposed sea-facing opening in an older house, fabric may simply be the wrong answer. An external shutter, a well-sealed frame or a blind in a moisture-tolerant material can do the job without asking a curtain to survive four months of splashing.

If the monsoon is the planning season, it helps to plan with evidence. Keep a simple note, room by room: which windows leaked, which rooms smelled musty, which stayed dark in the middle of the day, where the draught came from and which curtains marked first. That list becomes the specification.

Measure while you are there, and photograph each window with the curtain open and closed. Note what the fixing surface is — concrete lintel, laterite, timber — because that decides the hardware. It also saves a survey visit, or at least makes one quicker and more accurate. Note too which side of the house each window faces, since that shapes the answer for sun as well as rain.

Look at samples in the room, but remember that monsoon light is soft and grey. A colour that looks right in August may read quite differently in clear October sun, so treat monsoon sample decisions as provisional, and look again once the rains have cleared before anything is cut. Pinning a large sample to the actual window for a week tells you more than any small swatch held up in a showroom.