Do Foundation Vents Really Work?

Should You Vent Your Crawl Area?

Cupping is when the wood begins to curve up on the sides due to excessive moisture on the underside of the flooring boards, not a great thing. What makes this even worse is to assume that there was enough moisture of their crawl to move by way of the plywood subfloor after which have an effect on the hardwood that was nailed on prime of that. Do you open your crawl house vents in the summertime or in the winter? Doing Home Energy Audits for a living, I get to spend a lot of time in folks’s crawl spaces. I have the chance to assist shoppers solve perplexing and frustrating problems that are making them lose sleep at evening. Ok, possibly they aren’t dropping sleep, but they're fairly frustrated when I get there. As this point, everything turns into soaked in your crawl area – the floor joists, your insulation, the bottom and even the floor above.

For each degree the warm air is cooled, its relative humidity increases by 2.2 percent. Air that's eighty five degrees and has 65 p.c relative humidity exterior could also be cooled to 72 degrees with 90 percent relative humidity inside your crawl house.

Warm, humid air creates condensation when it enters your vents and meets up with the cooler surfaces in your crawl space, such as the filth or slab flooring and cold air ducts. In most circumstances, like in our area in East Tennessee, it is within the winter.

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Closing Crawl House Vents In The Winter

During the winter months, leaving the vents open reduces the power efficiency of your home by allowing cold air to leak in from the outside. Also, if temperatures routinely drop below freezing, pipes within the crawl space are more likely to freeze if the vents are open.

If you shut the vents in your crawl house, you're truly preserving the dry air out. If you open your crawl area vents in the summertime, you're actually allowing more humidity into your crawl space and creating an setting conducive to mould progress. The actuality is that the vents do not circulate enough air in the summertime to decrease the humidity beneath the house. The vents are a throwback to actually ventilated crawlspace - like a home on stilts. The first home suspected they were having issues when their amazingly stunning hardwood floors began to cup.

From a psychrometric standpoint, venting a crawl area to remove moisture works when the outside air is dryer than the crawl house air. “Dryer” doesn't imply a lower relative humidity, however quite a lower absolute humidity. Relative humidity is a ratio of the amount of moisture within the air relative to the quantity the air can hold at that temperature. Absolute humidity is the quantity of moisture in an quantity of air. Air at eighty five degrees and 60% RH has the identical absolute humidity as air at 70 degrees and a hundred% RH.

• Because moist crawl spaces cause the humidity in your home to rise which makes you uncomfortable and makes your HVAC work more durable costing you extra money.
• This “sweating” can be extra severe when occupants maintain indoor temperatures less than 75 levels or so.
• An even better solution is to cut foam board the exact dimension of the vent and press it into place to block all air from penetrating.
• The greatest resolution is to utterly seal your crawlspace and eliminate the problem completely.

One such methodology known as the "conditioned crawl space." Essentially, you close up the crawl space by sealing the muse vents with blocks of foam or clear acrylic reduce to fit these spaces. Foam blocks, about 2 inches thick, are glued onto the interior sides of the cinderblock walls. Heavy 6-mil plastic is placed one hundred pc over the filth floor and up the wall a few inches. Keep shrubs a minimum of three to 5 toes away from your own home so that you get good air circulation across the perimeter of your construction.

When To Shut Crawl Space Vents

As this air rises in the house, substitute air is drawn by way of the vents. This alternative air is made up of unconditioned outside air that enters through vents and other leaks. This pure upward air motion is called the "stack effect" - just like how a chimney works. It is hard sufficient for service people to crawl on and safe enough for storage. In some circumstances, a high-performance dehumidifier air filtration unit is added within the crawl house to assure that humidity ranges stay under 50%. Always seek the advice of your HVAC contractor to ensure crawlspace venting is sufficient. Before there were building scientists and houses have been simply built by carpenters and contractors , a high quality development job included basis vents into the crawlspace.

If you're experiencing mold in your crawlspace, there are several options you'll be able to look into for coping with the moisture issue that led to the mold development. The easiest method to close basis vents for the winter is to plug them from the skin with foam blocks made specifically for this objective. As you try this chore, check to ensure that the vent screens are intact in order that bugs and different critters don’t make a home under your own home. Air Vent makes ones that open at about 70 degrees F, shut about forty, and don’t require any electrical energy.