This homeowner tried to make his home more comfortable by applying fiberglass insulation between the floor joists, in his vented crawl space

What Happens To A Vented Crawl Space In The Winter?
Crawl space vents are designed to pull outside air into your home, creating a continuous supply of outside air that moves through the crawl space at all times.

While many would debate the usefulness of ventilating a crawl space at any time of the year, contractors can certainly agree that during cold weather, these vents should be firmly closed. However, the truth of the matter is that few homeowners actually perform this yearly task.

How A Vented Crawl Space Affects Your Home’s Energy Efficiency
The purpose of your crawl space is to house the utilities in your home, including utilities that use energy to create heat, such as your home’s furnace and air duct system, as well as your hot water heater and pipes.

Housing these utilities in the crawl space during the cold winter season means that they will have to continually work harder and use more energy to do their daily task. This has a major impact on your home’s utility bills!

Issues With Comfort & Your Quality Of Life
Any homeowner who has been in their attic during the summer (or has seen snow melting unevenly on a home with a poorly insulated attic in the winter) knows that heat rises upwards in a home, leaving the building through the attic and/or upper levels.

To replace the air leaving your home through the upper levels, new air is sucked upwards from the basement, crawl space, and lower levels of your home. This is true even if your crawl space has floor joists insulated with fiberglass, as fiberglass is a porous material that does not inhibit air movement.

Cold winter air moving upwards through your crawl space leads to cold floors underfoot and a drafty environment in your home. If your air ducts are also cold, then the drafty feeling of your home is increased.

Pest & Rodent Infestations
Rodents and other pests will seek the warmest, safest place they can in order to survive the winter. If your crawl space has open vents, they will provide an open pathway for these insects and animals to enter in to your home.

Mice and rats are particularly attracted to the crawl space environment, which is significantly warmer than the environment outside. Once inside your home, they will be more than happy to nest in any fiberglass insulation in the space and live, breed, create waste, and die there. Rodents are also known to chew on wires, which presents a very real and dangerous fire hazard to homeowners.

Advantages To Sealing Your Crawl Space
By sealing your crawl space and installing a vapor barrier on the walls and floors of the crawl space, you can hold back cold winter air, prevent drafts, and create a physical barrier to deter mice and pests from entering your home.

Many crawl space insulation products,such as rigid foam insulation and spray foam, are able to do double duty in your crawl space, providing additional energy efficiency while also offering all of the benefits of home insulation.

As an additional benefit, sealing and insulating your crawl space will protect the space from outside sourced of moisture, such as summer humidity which will condensate on surfaces in the cool, underground environment of the crawl space. This moisture has been proven many times to create an environment that is ideal for mold and rot, which can lead to structural damage to wood floor joists and girders.

Basement Systems pioneered the crawl space encapsulation industry with the CleanSpace System, designed to create a healthier, more energy efficient, and more valuable space in your crawl space. We offer free, on-site estimates and inspections for your home.  Contact us today for more information and to locate a dealer in your area.

via finehomebuilding.com

This is only one of the reasons why crawl space vents are such a bad idea!

Posted via web from basementsystemsinc’s posterous

A crawl space vapor barrier can prevent humidity and outside air from infiltrating your home.

For a crawl space, we install a 20-mil plastic crawl space vapor barrier called CleanSpace on the walls and floors. We also seal off the crawl space doors and vents to make an airtight space. If the crawl space has block walls, we seal off the open cavity on the top of the block with a clear plastic covering that allows termite inspectors to do their job without interfering with the installation. Once the crawl space is sealed, we can install a drain to take care of plumbing leaks, and we usually recommend a dehumidifier to help dry out the wood and keep the humidity levels appropriate in the space in the future.

Keep humidity out of your basement with ThermalDry basement flooring.

Basement Systems provides a variety of different basement wall products and floor matting, all of which will provide a vapor barrier on the surfaces that will keep humidity from entering the home through the walls and floors. There’s also a basement dehumidifier that we can install that, when combined with the wall and floor system, should help keep mold and dust mites from feeding off everything organic in the basement.

We also have many other products that will keep the house energy-efficient and safe from damage, including energy-efficient basement windows and energy saving window wells.

Inquiring Eye Home Inspections, located in Trumbull, CT are basement and crawl space specialists that help homeowners to not only find problems in new homes, but to assist them in making their homes healthier and more energy efficient.

The training helps Real Estate agents to learn to address damp and wet basements, and musty crawl spaces. Instead of leaving homeowners to deal with these situations on their own, Inquiring Eye Home Inspections helps them to understand the problems and solutions that basement and crawl space environments hold.

To keep mice and other rodents out, The National Pest Management Association recommends that you make sure all holes of larger diameter than a pencil are sealed in your home.  Mice can squeeze through spaces that are as small as a nickel!

Keep your home safe and sanitary by sealing off your crawl space. This will eliminate moisture to prevent mold, and will seal cracks that may act as entranceways for rodents and other pests.

The CleanSpace crawl space system will seal off the vents, door and any other open spaces.  The vapor barrier can also tightly seal your crawl space against moisture.  Find out more about the crawl space encapsulation system today!

The list discusses many of the issues that we here at Basement Systems have been addressing for the last 7 years, including the sealing of a crawl space with a thick, impermeable liner (you can’t save the planet if your throwing away a crawlspace full of 6-mil plastic every two years) and then conditioning the space.

You can see the crawl space list in it’s entirety at the Southface Web site, but as it deals with new construction, I have truncated it here to reflect sealing a crawl space in an existing home.

Here’s the list:

1. Moisture can enter the crawlspace when the home is being constructed, creating mold even before the home is completed. Proper drainage, sealing and insulating are important early in construction—before the floor joists are installed.
2. After construction, proper drainage is essential. Install a drainage plane on the foundation and a perimeter French drain that channels water away from the house.
3. Install continuous insulation on the walls. An example is a foam board that will not deteriorate should it ever get wet
4. Install a continuous, sealed plastic vapor barrier on the ground. Experience has shown that standard “6-mil poly” isn’t strong enough to survive construction so consider thicker, reinforced plastic. Overlap the seams and use mastic to seal the plastic “liner” to the walls and piers.
5. Construct a weatherstripped, properly insulated access door or crawlspace hatch.
6. Consider installing a dehumidifier plumbed to the outside or to a sump pump. Install a relative humidity (RH) meter and monitor it to keep the space below 50 percent relative humidity.

The CleanSpace Crawl Space Encapsulation System that addresses the above five issues. There are many products that make up the system, including a 20-mil crawl space vapor barrier with an anti-microbial agent built in.

A damp, musty, smelly crawl space is not the best place for a human to live, but mold, mildew, bugs and various other critters love these environments. To eliminate these unwelcome guests, a home owner needs to change the environment.

Omni Basement Systems the basement and crawl space contractor in Hamilton, Ontario who photographed the dead rat, installs the CleanSpace Crawl Space Encapsulation System to help remedy damp crawl spaces. This is a crawl space vapor barrier system that takes into account the crawl space vents and ventilation, the door or hatch, air leaks, conditioning, and more.

Omni Basement Systems offers free crawl space inspections and estimates on the CleanSpace system.

Studies have shown (one specifically through Advanced Energy) that you can save up to 15-20% if humidity is eliminated from your crawl space and home. Variables include how many stories your house is, if you have ducts in the crawl space, how big the crawl space is, etc.

Some crawl spaces have insulation in the floor above. This is mainly because the vents allow so much cold air in the winter that the floor needs insulation. Since insulation contains organic materials in the resin used to set the fibers, it is a prime breeding ground for mold. Even if it gets just a bit damp, the insulation loses all purpose. Heavy moisture burdened insulation hanging down from the sealing is a common sight in dirt crawl spaces.

In order to control the moisture in your crawl space, sealing up the crawl space vents is the first step. Secondly, separate the crawl space from the earth using a heavy puncture proof material like CleanSpace. This keep moisture and rot at bay. Finally use an energy efficient heavy duty dehumidifier (like the SaniDry) that will circulate the air and remove the humidity.

Taking these steps will bring you results that will make you wish you knew about the systems sooner. Odor removal, energy savings, and extra storage space make this project worthwhile.