If you care about your heating and cooling bills, then you should care about your crawl space. If you care about the comfort of your home, then you should care about your crawl space.

It’s been relatively warm this winter, but we’re not out of it just yet. We all know temperatures can drop quickly without warning in Atlanta, and when this happens, all you want to do is curl up in your warm home. But sometimes your home simply does not stay warm! Imagine running across the floor with your socks on and realizing the floor is cold. What’s causing your home to stay cooler – and energy bills much higher than you’d like?

CRAWL SPACE ENCAPSULATION

If your home sits on a vented, dirt crawl space, there’s your answer! Those crawl space vents let in cold, damp air that lingers in your crawl space before escaping upwards into your cozy home. And you better keep that heater fired up because it’s fighting a losing battle having to work twice or thrice as hard to combat that cold air entering from below.

Think of your home as a Yeti tumbler in which you can store a hot or cold beverage. That tumbler is 100% insulated from outside air, which means hot liquids stay hot, and cold liquids stay cold. This is how your crawl space should perform, as an isolated unit. But it’s not how crawl spaces are constructed. Rather, crawl spaces are built with vents, which allow outside air to enter, but not escape. Hence, that air lingers in your crawl space, the coolest part of your home.

The Stack Effect

Warm air rises so that air eventually actually escapes through your main floor. This is called the Stack Effect.

During winter, that cold crawl space air flows through the main floor of your home. As a result, your home now must overcompensate for all that cold, often damp air coming from your crawl space and essentially must work double-time to keep your house and floors warm.

I’m sure you can imagine the strain on your heater…and impact on your heating bills! If the air coming through is also damp, it takes even MORE energy to warm.

As we mentioned, when cold air enters your vented dirt crawl space, the original intent was that it would cross-ventilate and exit through the vents as well. But it doesn’t. It lingers, and that air is also damp from ground or wall moisture, it can cause additional problems like mold spore growth, wall discoloration, and critter infestation.

Regardless, that cold and often damp, musty or moldy air eventually escapes upwards through the main floor of your home.

This then increases your energy bills by as much as 30% annually.

Fortress' Solution

The good news is that there is a solution: Fortress’ 4-Steps to crawl space repair. To properly waterproof and climatize a crawl space, you need to do the following:

• Stop groundwater leakage by fixing the periphery water flow with EZFlow
• Isolate the house from the earth
• Seal off outside air
• Keep your crawl space air DRY and regulated

How much money are we talking of saving by properly encapsulating your crawl space?
So, you will save about 25% on your per annum energy bills. Over the years this money really adds up and our CleanSpace encapsulation system can actually pay for itself in as little as 7 years.

That percentage of savings can, however, be tightened with a Home Energy Audit, as there are depending factors like if your home is one or two stories, how big your crawl space is; how many vents the crawl space has.

Each home is different, and we treat each home like it is our own home. So if you have cold floors or high energy bills in Altavista, Brookneal, Concord, Evington, Gladys, Lynch Station, Rustburg, and the surrounding areas, give Fortress Foundation Solutions a call at 1-434-473-7012 or schedule a meeting with one of our System Design Specialists to provide your free evaluation to assess your crawl space and customize a solution to meet your home’s specific needs.