Crawl Space Repair & Encapsulation WV

Encapsulating your West Virginia home’s crawl space will almost surely help you save money on electricity. Some estimates claim that encapsulating your crawl space might save you up to 15% to 25% on energy bills. When the air is humid, it might be more difficult to cool your home, whether you’re cooling your crawl space or the rest of your house.

When you encapsulate your crawl space, you eliminate any opportunities for moisture to enter. When moisture can’t get into your crawl space, it can’t go into the rest of your house. That means you’ll need to use a lot less energy to keep the air in your crawl space and your house clean.

One of the most crucial areas in your West Virginia home is the crawl space. Its primary function is to hold your home’s essential systems, such as electrical wiring, plumbing, insulation, HVAC, floor support beams, and the foundation itself. All of these systems are critical to the efficient and smooth operation of your home. If these systems are wet or damaged, they will not perform well, let alone if they are forced to operate in the midst of a flood. To prevent this from happening, you must seal off the crawl space.

Basement Authority of West Virginia can completely encapsulate your crawl space, preventing unconditioned air, moisture, mold, and mildew spores from ever entering. Waterproofing with an interior drainage system and a sump pump, vapor barrier, vent covers, and a dehumidifier are the key components of this process. The interior drainage system will be installed along the crawl space’s perimeter to catch leaking water and direct it to a sump pump, the heart of our comprehensive drainage system. The pump will work to steer the water away from your home once it has accumulated enough water in its basin. The vapor barrier seals off the whole crawl space, making it impossible for water or moisture penetration. It also prevents groundwater from rising and flooding the crawl space from below.

Any open vents in your crawl space will be sealed with the vent covers. This ensures that the crawl space stays dry no matter how bad the weather is outside. Our professionals will install a dehumidifier within the crawl space before entirely sealing the area. If moisture is still an issue, the dehumidifier will filter it out and distribute clean air throughout the crawl space and home.

High levels of humidity or standing water in your crawl space can lead to a variety of problems, one of the most prevalent and dangerous is mold. This is especially true during the summer, when West Virginia’s frequent rains provide an excellent habitat for mold to develop and thrive. When you boil it down to its most basic components, mold and wood rot fungus have a lot in common. However, there is one significant distinction between the two: whereas wood rot fungi are generally harmless to humans, certain mold species can be actively toxic. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between mold that’s harmless and mold that’s possibly dangerous.

Mold, fortunately, is pretty straightforward to detect in any home. When mold thrives, it causes discoloration, changes in texture, and emits a musty, often sweet odor. If you sense a musty odor, inspect sections of your home that are infrequently utilized, as well as hidden nooks of rooms that are frequently humidified (like your kitchen or bathroom). Mold may grow practically everywhere, but it prefers dark, little-used areas. Mold can be white, gray, pink, brown, black, or even green in color, depending on the development.

The mold that you should be most concerned about is black mold. Many other types of mold are harmless or perhaps mildly harmful, but black mold can be extremely harmful to anyone who comes into contact with it. Even if the contact is brief, infection, rashes, disorientation, breathing problems, and even fainting or seizures can occur. Those who are already vulnerable are, of course, the ones who are most at risk of significant and long-term consequences from mold exposure. Mold can be dangerous in many circumstances and should be dealt with as soon as possible.

Given how small the crawl space is, excessive humidity can be a major problem. Mold and mildew spores, as well as some pests, thrive in humid conditions more than in colder, drier ones. As a result, your humid crawl space could be ripe with all of these moisture problems without your notice.

A healthy humidity level, for example, should be between 30 and 50 percent at most. Mold and mildew grow swiftly at humidity levels exceeding 60%, while they have been seen to start growing at humidity levels as low as 55%. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only issue that high humidity levels can cause in your home.

If you discover that your home is much warmer than it usually is in the summer, you may want to adjust the temperature of your air conditioner. Furthermore, your home may be much cooler in the winter than it was previously, requiring you to turn up the heat. The stack effect is responsible for both of these outcomes. Because warm air is lighter than cool air, the humidity that collects in your crawl space will ascend to the rest of your house throughout the summer, making it feel muggier inside. In the winter, however, the thicker, colder air that seeps into the crawl space pushes this warm air out, making your home seem chilling. As a result of this waste, your energy expenses will increase.

Consider your West Virginia home as a chimney, with air entering from the bottom, rising through the structure, and exiting at the top. Air pressure is also a consideration. Air moves from high-pressure locations to low-pressure ones. The larger the temperature differential between inside and outside, the more essential this airflow becomes.

The crawl space provides more than half of the air you breathe in your home. That means that anything in your crawl space also is in the air in the rest of your home. For example, if there is mold in the crawl area, you and your family are likely inhaling these harmful spores.

Other issues that can arise as a result of open crawl space vents and the stack effect include water intrusion, high humidity, wood rot, sagging floors, excess energy consumption.

Dehumidifiers can help to keep your crawl space dry by removing excess moisture. The level of the damage you’re witnessing in your crawl space will determine whether or not a dehumidifier may assist with fixing your problem. Dehumidifiers help to remove moisture from the air and can function pretty consistently if cycled on a regular basis. Dehumidifiers can help protect your space from immediate damage while also preventing a build-up of air pressure that could later circulate moist air throughout the rest of your home.

Dehumidifiers, on the other hand, are not fix-all solutions. If you have a lot of moisture in your crawl space, it’s a good idea to combine a dehumidifier with other waterproofing techniques like a vapor barrier, an interior drainage system, and a sump pump. As a result, the various waterproofing methods will be able to assist one another while removing undesirable moisture from your space.