A crawl space is a cellar nobody can stand up in, which is exactly why it gets ignored. The floor above it is cold, the air in it moves up into the house, and almost nobody has looked at it in years.
Vented crawl spaces are common in the older housing here, and on a coastal site a vent is not doing what the person who cut it thought it was doing.
Call +1 506-300-4863 and we will get under there.
The theory behind crawl space vents is that outside air dries the space out.
That works where outside air is drier than the space. Here it frequently is not. With something like seventy fog days a year, air arriving off the bay is close to saturated for long stretches, and when it meets ground that stays cool all summer it drops its moisture rather than carrying any away.
So the vents run a slow supply of damp air into a cool space. The joists above take it on, and the floor of the house is the boundary between the two.
The approach that works is to stop treating the crawl space as outdoors.
A ground sheet goes down over the earth and gets taped at the laps and run up the walls. Closed cell foam goes onto the perimeter walls and across the rim joist. The vents get closed.
The space is now inside the building envelope. It stays within a few degrees of the rooms above, it is dry, and the floor stops being cold.
That last part is what people actually notice.
There are two places the insulation can go, and they are not equivalent.
Insulating the underside of the floor leaves the crawl space itself outside the envelope, still cold, still holding whatever is in it, with services running through it that now need their own protection.
Insulating the perimeter walls brings the space inside. Pipes and ducts down there stop being at risk, and the assembly is far simpler.
We insulate the walls in almost every case. Where the underside of the floor genuinely is the right answer, we will say so.
This is the service where access moves the number more than anything else.
A crawl space with a decent hatch and eighteen inches of headroom is straightforward. One entered through a cupboard floor, with ductwork in the way and a foot of clearance, is a different job at the same square footage.
Existing material has to come out first, and in a wet crawl space that is often unpleasant work. We price it honestly rather than discovering it on the day.
We go under, see what is there, and come back with a written figure.
Call +1 506-300-4863 to arrange it.
We handle roofs, foundations, floors, outbuildings and commercial decks throughout the region.
No single surface on a building loses more heat than the one over your head, and none is cheaper to put right. In a tall house it is worse again, because air rising through three storeys reaches the ceiling with real force behind it.
View Attic Insulation
A cellar is the one part of a building that is cold, damp and connected to everything above it at the same time. Left alone it drags the ground floor down and pushes moist air up through the house.
View Basement Insulation
Two separate problems get called garage insulation. One is wanting the garage itself usable. The other is the cold room sitting above it.
View Garage Insulation
Open framing is the cheapest opportunity anybody gets at a building envelope, and it lasts a few weeks. Everything after boarding is more expensive and less effective.
View New Construction Insulation
Similar rigs, similar guns, two materials whose behaviour diverges enough that picking the wrong one is a failure rather than a trade-off.
View Closed Cell and Open Cell Spray Foam
Two reasons material comes out. Either it has failed on its own over decades, or somebody installed foam badly and it never worked.
View Insulation Removal and Replacement
Warehouses, workshops, shops, offices above shops, and the parts of an industrial building where the temperature actually has to hold. Larger surfaces, harder access, and a schedule that has to work around a business that is still running.
View Commercial and Industrial InsulationBook somebody in. The space gets measured, the substrate gets read, and the price you receive is the price you pay.
Type of space, approximate size, whether anything heats it today, and the problem you want solved. Prefer to talk it through? Call +1 506-300-4863.
