Welp, you’ve recently discovered some serious water accumulation under your home or experienced a pretty devastating floor damage due to excess moisture underneath your crawl space or pier and beam foundation home. To *AVOID* this issue again at all costs, what can you do to prevent it and keep your crawl space as dry as possible from here on out?
Or you might be looking for solutions to your wet crawl space in the Brazos Valley area – either way, you’re in the right place.
At Anchor Foundation Repair, we’ve lived through a couple of really wet seasons recently and seen the costly effects they have had on homes with overly soggy crawl spaces. We’ve researched these issues to offer solutions for maintaining the driest crawl space possible and give you the best chance of preventing a recurrence of floor damage in your home.
In this article, we describe basic solutions for keeping your crawl space as dry as possible. We also review customized packages developed by Anchor to help address this issue from a localized standpoint tailored to our Brazos Valley environment and homes.
What Happens When Crawl Spaces Are Wet
Lots of unpleasant things happen when crawl space foundations are constantly damp, moisture-laden, or downright soggy. The underside of your home can develop problems with:
- dry rot,
- Mold, mildew, and other various “growths”,
- Smells and sewage,
- Termite infestation,
- Floor system degradation,
- Risk of injury or illness,
- Lack of home and floor stability, and
- Eventual crawl space foundation problems.
Many of these excess moisture-related issues start and spread unnoticed because they happen in the crawl space where you don’t normally hang out. However, there’s one alarming problem that can literally *pop up* right into your living space – a specific flooring problem.
When a crawl space is wet and the weather is hot, your AC runs non-stop. Steamy Texas summers like this (we’ve had a few recently) cause a telltale flooring issue where your finish flooring begins to buckle, tent, and/or pop up causing serious damage to the floors you walk on every day – it’s pretty drastic and hard to ignore.
This happens frequently with hardwood floors but other types of flooring are susceptible as well. You get these noticeable speed bumps and floor waves in your house, and the only way to solve this issue is with a full flooring replacement (and possible subfloor replacement depending on the extent of the damage).
You might already know this because you just went through it and never want *that* to happen again. In case you’re reading this and that hasn’t happened yet, just know that it could happen under the right (or should I say *wrong*) conditions.
Basic Solutions to Keep Your Crawl Space Dry
Typical solutions for getting your wet crawl space drier include the following:
- Exchanging humid air for drier air,
- Diverting water away from the crawl space using multiple methods,
- Physically removing moisture from the area,
- Minimizing the impact of water in the crawl space, and
- Continued work on the drainage efforts surrounding the home.
These vague and lofty solutions translate to practical things like more or bigger vents in the crawl space, electric vent fans, gutters, downspout extensions, catch basins, french drains, sump pumps, encapsulation, dehumidifiers, etc. You may have heard of some of this stuff or it all might be Greek to you. But that’s where Anchor is here to help . . .
Tailored Solutions to Keep Brazos Valley Crawl Spaces Dry
Addressing excess crawl space moisture is challenging for a homeowner because you don’t spend a lot of time down there under your home. You don’t know what’s normal and not normal, what’s optimal and not optimal, or even where you should start. It’s all a little overwhelming.
Do you know who does spend a lot of time under homes??? WE DO.
Anchor knows firsthand the issues that too much moisture can cause. We also don’t want to see the hard work we’ve done repairing crawl space foundations get quickly undone by excess wetness that hasn’t been solved.
We built out three crawl space moisture solutions tailored to our Brazos Valley environment and home styles. Each package builds on the one before it, adding more protection as your moisture issue gets more serious. Our goal with every package is to keep your crawl space in a healthy range of 50-55% relative humidity.
Your Moisture Management Solution Options:
- The Moisture Block Package
- The Humidity Control Package
- The Water Removal Package
Don’t think of these packages as a good, better, best type of choice. The one you need is the one you need depending on your home situation. The packages do have differing costs with The Moisture Blocker Package being the least expensive. Then, the solution prices go up from there with more complex work and heavier equipment needs. We’ll explain each solution in more detail now.
The Moisture Block Package
This package focuses on blocking low-level moisture that occurs from groundwater vapor and water seepage around and inside your crawl space before they affect your crawl space environment. It’s a good fit if your crawl space already has decent passive ventilation and a positive drainage situation, but ground moisture is still creeping in.
This package also serves as a good preventative and protective measure to help your crawl space foundation repairs last as long as possible by blocking ground vapor.
This foundational solution includes:
- Grading and clearing of the crawl space to even out the surface, eliminating high and low spots to prepare for barrier materials
- Installing dimple matting directly on the crawl space floor (a textured sheet that smooths the ground, channels moisture away, and protects the vapor barrier from punctures — picture bubble wrap turned inside out, dimples pressed in instead of bubbles poking out)
- Installing a vapor barrier on top of the dimple matting
- Optional fans to mechanically encourage more air circulation and cross ventilation
The main goal of this package is to block the biggest source of vapor and humidity, the ground itself, so you can improve your crawl space’s humidity level without relying on any mechanical tools (unless they are needed for cross ventilation).
The Humidity Control Package
Includes everything in The Moisture Block Package, plus active air management.
If your crawl space has a persistent feel of dampness or you’re noticing signs of fungal growth, blocking moist air and water seepage isn’t enough. This package adds mechanical equipment to actively pull moisture-laden air out of the space.
This package includes:
- Just like The Moisture Blocker Package (grading and clearing, dimple matting, vapor barrier) with some additions
- Sealing all vents except one or more where a mechanical vent fan pulls out humid air, along with radon and other dangerous crawl space gasses (# of fans depends on size of the crawl space).
- Installing a dedicated dehumidifier in the crawl space, with a drain line, to remove the captured moisture from the crawl space
This solution helps considerably with the issue that created your flooring catastrophe, because that water vapor won’t get drawn up by your AC through the floor of your home.
This solution isolates the air under your home for focused dehumidification. You can’t dehumidify all of Texas (believe us, we’ve checked), so we close off the area first to give your dehumidifier a fighting chance instead of an impossible mission.
You may be thinking that this sounds a lot like crawl space encapsulation, but it’s not. We stop short of full encapsulation because we don’t see evidence of it working well for older homes in our area. Full encapsulation is something that can be done when a modern home is first built, but it’s not feasible in our opinion for existing homes with an established moisture problem.
The Water Removal Package
Includes everything in The Moisture Block and Humidity Control Packages, plus heavy water removal.
You’ve got your gutters and downspouts optimized. You’ve got your yard graded as best you can. There’s no uneven concrete flat-work sending water under your home. But moisture is still getting in for unknown reasons.
Some homes are situated in ways that mean moisture keeps getting in no matter what you do in your own yard. If you’ve tried the other solutions and moisture still persists, this is the package for you. The addition of a sump pump ramps this package up to mega-moisture removal levels.
This package includes:
- Everything from The Moisture Block and Humidity Control Packages (grading and clearing, dimple matting, vapor barrier, vent fan, dehumidifier in most cases)
- Crawl space contouring to shape the dirt and guide water to a collection point
- Installation of an automatic sump pump, with grading and a drain line directed to the pump, to remove standing water accumulation
Every package includes a 6-month and 12-month checkup ($600 value), where we compare your humidity levels against the pre-repair baseline, inspect drain lines and dehumidifiers, and perform any needed maintenance. After the first year, you can continue a once-per-year maintenance visit for $300 annually.
The Best Way to Work Towards the Driest Crawl Space Possible
Working towards a dry crawl space is like a marathon, not a sprint. It’s going to take a while and it’s not easy. Be prepared for the long-haul, trial-and-error process of getting your crawl space foundation in the best shape possible. If this is the home you love, we know you want to do everything you can to keep it in good repair for safe and healthy living.
At Anchor Foundation Repair, we don’t fix things that don’t need fixin’ and we don’t try to sell you stuff that you don’t need. After experiencing some soggy summers beside our Brazos Valley friends and neighbors, along with an overwhelming number of panicked phone calls, we see the need in the community for these moisture management solutions.
If you’re ready to get started with tailored-to-you moisture management the Anchor Way, give us a call or reach out 24/7 with our online get-a-quote form.
