Crawl Space Encapsulation with – UnderHome Armor
For many years homes in Florida were built over a soil crawl space, especially older homes all over the state. Crawl spaces offered a fast way to install a foundation and easy access to the underside of a home. Crawl spaces provided little protection from the environment and with our humidity in Florida the wood used to build the crawl space has rotted or is sagging, which leads to structural problems with your entire home and air quality problems inside your home.
High levels of moisture, rodents, soil, gas and dust are what is found in most unsealed dirt crawl spaces in Florida.
It’s not uncommon for many crawl spaces to have all of the problems listed above, along with standing water after heavy rains which are common to all of Florida. The most common and economical solution is to seal the crawl space with a vapor barrier.
Crawl spaces are commonly shallow, unfinished spaces under a wood frame or mobile home. The dirt floors allow, moisture, insects and rodents, which will ruin the structure of your home and adversely affect the air quality of your home. These moist crawl spaces in Florida promote the rotting of structural components and floor joists which support the floors of your home, causing sagging floors.
The older homes and their builders wanted the ventilation of the crawl spaces to circulate outside air into the crawl space and control the moisture. This doesn’t work because the ventilation of the crawl spaces usually does more harm than good. In Florida this supplies humid outside air into your homes crawl space, which will turn into water once in comes into contact with the cool surfaces under your home in the crawl space.
Current building codes combat the moisture problems by calling for sealed crawl spaces without foundation vents.
Unwanted silt and dust can move from a crawl space into living spaces, if heating and air conditioning ducts are located in the crawl space. The movement of air through your home during heating periods due to “stack effect” will transport dust and silt through the home.
Here’s your solution: UnderHome Armor
Your homes crawlspace should be an extension of the living space in your home, by providing clean, dry, insulated air along the exterior foundation walls and sealing the dirt floor with a weather proof barrier to exclude moisture and other contaminants from the dirt below.
UnderHome Armor uses a thick plastic vapor barrier that seals your crawl space and protects your home from all of these problems… before Installation we will:
1. Seal crawl space vent holes with concrete blocks and polyurethane caulk (the caulk allows ease of block removal if needed in the future.
2. Before installing the UnderHome Armor vapor barrier, we eliminate any sources of water into your homes crawl space.
3. If you have low areas that are holding water we can install a sump pump system with a french drain if needed. Or a simple drain in some cases.
In Extreme Cases: If high amounts of moisture are a problem, then we could install an “Active Depressurization system” which uses a radon pump to create a continuous vacuum under your homes UnderHome Armor membrane. This continuously sucks out the moisture, gases, dust and silt from underneath the UnderHome Armor, effectively and safely evacuating moisture from the crawl space of your home.