Indoor Air Quality
"But we JUST built it and JUST moved in!" Conditions to destroy your home moved in before you did.
"But we just replaced the floor!" Conditions that caused you to replace the floor still exist.
"We have an embarrassing musky smell and the children are always sick" 30 to 60 % of the air you breathe is generated from your crawlspace.
Uncontrolled moisture problems lead to failure in the structural integrity.
"We are breathing the difference and it's incredible!" House health from the ground up. Leave it alone and lose it, or leave it to us to fix it.
Crawlspace foundations are widely used throughout the United States especially in the Southeast. Unfortunately, traditional wall-vented crawlspaces host a variety of serious problems: high humidity, musty odors, buckled hardwood floors, and mold damage. In the humid Southeast, ventilation with outside air contributes to moisture problems instead of preventing them.
A dirt crawl space is a very bad idea! Earth has very high humidity in the soil. This water vapor moves into the crawlspace and upwards into the house. A damp environment is unhealthy and destructive. Mold thrives and reproduces airborne spores by the millions, and some molds are toxic. Insects and critters love damp, wet environments. Rot and decay are a result of damp environments causing structural damage. The natural airflow in a house is from bottom to top. This sucks moist air and everything in it up into the living area. Mold spores, odors, humidity and critters create a very unhealthy environment. Many people are allergic to these things, and experience a host of symptoms and don't realize their dirt crawlspace is affecting their health. Dirt crawl spaces do not have to be wet or flooded to be extremely unhealthy.
You Care About Your Crawlspace Because You Care About...
- How much you pay for utilities
- Your home rotting, mold, allergies, asthma
- Comfort, cold floors, drafts, and smells
- How long paint lasts on your house, doors and windows sticking
- Hardwood floors buckling, carpets going moldy
- Resale value
The house is one building. You can’t have one part of the building sick, and another part healthy. You can’t rationalize you never go in the crawlspace, so you aren’t affected by it.
Crawlspace air is bad. It is damp, cold in the winter, full of mold spores, it smells. This air is what you are breathing. In fact 40 to 60% of the air you breathe is generated from your crawlspace. If someone spray paints something in your crawlspace, do you think you’d smell the spray paint upstairs? Of course you would.
The energy loss is so substantial in a home with a vented dirt crawlspace with ducts, that you may as well ignore all other ways to save energy until you fix the crawlspace problem. Caulking around a window, or weather-stripping a door, would be like patching a tiny hole in a rowboat, and ignoring the foot-wide round hole on the other side.
