During the last ten years, a new type of problems with wood rot has emerged in Scandinavia. Thousands of houses have been damaged by wood rot attaching to the exterior wood panel. This paper provides an overview of finished and ongoing work in order to identify the cause of these problems. In field tests, the moisture conditions were measured in panels coated with different paint systems. The influence of the panel structure and end-grain sealing on the moisture balance was also studied. The results from these tests show a large difference in the moisture balance between panels with different exterior wood coatings. In laboratory tests, the transmission of water vapour through paint films was measured using a modified cup method, which provides more realistic conditions for coated wood than the common cup method. One interesting observation made in the studies reported here is that latex paints seem to be much more permeable at high levels of relative humidity than earlier research has shown.

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