My last article discussed the dirt floor, vented crawl spaces and the problems that they can cause unsuspecting home-owners. I also stated that an in-efficient crawlspace can drastically increase your heating and cooling bills. I will continue to discuss the reasons that water can easily enter your crawlspace and adversely affect your home.
Most homes are built on cinder block foundations which are stacked on top of a poured footer. Cinder blocks are like sponges and suck up any water that is near, coupled w/ the fact that the mortar joints are not capable of repelling water even if they are perfectly laid. Block foundation walls easily allow water and moisture into crawl spaces. Some builders and some of my fellow peers will install a catch drain inside the crawlspace to divert the water to a sump pump. This is counter-intuitive as it still does not help w/ the moisture. By allowing water into and under your home, you still raise the humidity exponentially. It is not the water itself that hurts your home. Rarely is it standing water that is the issue, but the water vapor. Water vapor translates into relative humidity. Your humidity levels are directly contingent on water being present. Vapor equals humidity. Most home-owners do not know the correlation between moisture levels and humidity. When the air temperature is raised or lowered, the humidity changes accordingly. Typically, when air enters the crawl space, it is cooled. Cooling outside air increases the relative humidity. By having open vented crawl spaces, we are actually increasing the humidity by up to 2 percent for every degree that we cool it. It does not take a mathematician to see that we unknowingly are making our crawlspaces wet and dangerous without even trying to.
Call Douglas R. Whitehead II at ‘Array of Solutions’ or go to ‘Arrayofsolutions.com’ to have your home inspected today!