Foundation Ventilation

Your foundation is arguably the most important part of your home. If your foundation is compromised through moisture damage, the entire structure of your home is also susceptible to damage. For this reason, foundation ventilation should be a priority for homeowners.

Why It’s Important to Protect Your Foundation From Moisture

Moisture that’s allowed to sit around the foundation creates a variety of problems. First and foremost, it can enter and expand cracks, as mentioned. Beyond this, water can seep into your crawl space, where it accelerates mold growth and wood rot, and where it serves as a water source for pests like termites, rodents, and snakes. Here’s why it’s important to protect your foundation from moisture.

1. Prevent Structural Damage — Wood and water don’t mix well. When wood sits in moisture, it begins to rot. Over time, your sub-structure starts to deteriorate. Combining with moisture damage is the impact of termites. Termites thrive in moist, humid environments, and as they eat away at your wood, the damage compromises your sub-structure.
2. Avoid Mold — Mold colonies expand quickly in moist areas where they have access to wood and insulation, making your crawl space an ideal habitat.
3. Protect From Pests — Water attracts pests of all kinds, including snakes and rodents. Allowed to thrive, pests can do their own damage to your home.

More on Mold

Why is mold in your crawl space such a problem? Although most homeowners never go into their crawl spaces, mold can seriously affect human health. Mold spores can easily travel through the air as it rises up from the crawl space into the upper levels of your home, where you and your family live.

Mold spores can cause a variety of physical symptoms, including coughing, headaches, and eye irritation. For people who have allergies, these symptoms can be severe.

The presence of mold can also affect your home’s value. If mold isn’t dealt with, it can impact the stability of the wood in your sub-structure. And home buyers don’t want to find out that there’s a mold problem in a house they’re considering.

How Foundation Ventilation Works to Prevent Moisture

Standard vents are inadequate for the humid South. They simply allow more humid air into the crawl space. Auto Temp-Vents are a solution that operate automatically, reacting to the air temperature to facilitate the flow of air. These vents allow air to flow but don’t allow pests to enter.

If your home requires extra venting power, we recommend Powered Temp-Vents. They’re designed for areas that need a higher rate of airflow and for areas that are hard to vent. These vents, while extremely effective, don’t demand much electricity, keeping your energy bill low.

We also install new openings for additional vents in the foundation if they’re needed. And we add foundation vent wells to prevent vents from accumulating dirt and debris.

Foundation Ventilation Protects Your Home

Foundation ventilation is an important step to protect your home from a variety of threats, from mold to termites to wood rot. Combined with a moisture barrier or encapsulation, it can give you peace of mind that your crawl space is safe from moisture and humidity.