over 1 year ago

Crawl spaces are inherently dirty smelly places that can contain all forms of unwanted odors from mold & mildew to urine & feces. Some aspects of the nation will even have soil underneath your home with odorless, harmful gases like radon gas. I'm a huge believer that the most effective long-term solution to resolve these problems is to encapsulate the air underneath the home with a liner system. It is just a inherently impossible to keep rodents, bugs and mold from the area underneath the home because the soil is exposed - but it is relatively simple to make a barrier between the house and crawl space the keep out all these unwanted nuisances.

I had a very nice lady write me the other day telling me relating to this house she'd just purchased that formerly had many cats living in the crawl space and they left behind the smell of a huge litter box underneath her home. The odors were coming up through the wooden floor and developing a very fowl smell in the house. She explained she tried many different solutions: spreading baking soda, spraying a chemical treatment originally created for carpets & setting up new top soil - naturally none worked.

I wrote her back, apologized for her wasted time and suggested that she treat her crawl space like a wild beast that you can't defeat, only contain. She took my advise, installed a crawl space encapsulation system and the smells immediately went away.Encapsulation systems are rated by permeability - 0.000 is the greatest, normal plastic is 0.01 and wood is 0.2. To avoid all smells, moisture and gases search for an encapsulation liner system with a 0.000 permeability rating. A zero perm liner may also completely weatherize the crawl space and save on energy bills since the outside air won't be able to leak in to the home visit website .

I can't inform you how many times I've received a phone or been sent an email from the homeowner telling me how they visited Home Depot, bought a liner system as thin as a garbage bag, spent a complete weekend installing after that it didn't solve their problem. Cheap store bought liners are typically 6-12 mil, 0.01 permeability and even new they don't stop gases like Radon - they're also easily chewed through by bugs and rodents leaving the crawl space annually later leaking air just like a sieve.