LESLIE: Next up, a moisture question from Texas.
George, what’s going on?
GEORGE: Underneath the house itself is totally wet all the time. I could be in a drought situation and it’d still be wet underneath there. And I check for leaks and stuff on this order and there’s no leaks and I’m worried about the possibility of mold and stuff like that.
TOM: Right. You probably need to get more ventilation in there. Sometimes that vinyl skirting, even though it’s perforated, does not really have enough open area to let air blow through that space. I would suggest that you might think about, in a couple of places there, substituting some of that skirting for some other, more ventilated material – perhaps some latticework or something of that nature – where you can actually get a bigger volume of air moving underneath your home. Because if you’re going to basically have a building on top and you’re going to have vinyl skirting all the way around, there’s really no way for the moisture to evaporate. Now that would be the first step.
If for any reason you want to boost that even more, the next thing you could do is you could install a fan in there. And the fan, though, would be controlled by a humidistat, not a thermostat, so that whenever the humidity got really high, it would kick on and it would force more air through.
LESLIE: Which also makes it really energy-efficient because you’re not wasting unnecessary energy.
TOM: Yeah, exactly.
GEORGE: That’d be the same principal as an exhaust fan up in the attic then.
TOM: Yes, exactly. Except in the attic, though, they work on thermostats. In a crawlspace, such as what you’re talking about, they’re going to work on a humidistat. So it’s a moisture switch as opposed to a temperature switch.
GEORGE: Alrighty. Thank you very much. I have to try that.
TOM: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT, 888-666-3974.
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