The common crawl space is something most homeowners don't think about everyday. It tends to be a place that is dark, murky, cold, sometimes damp and easily ignored. It can be very hazardous to forget about small space because this space is key to your home's health-if you lose track of it you may find yourself with mold, allergens and unwanted critters.Mold is the result of latent moisture. It begins to develop and then feed upon organic materials such as wood, carpet, and paint. A dirt crawl space is a prime target for mold because the dirt will never be completely dry.

Mold's main purpose is to break down dead organic matter, objects that were once living and are now dead and wet. Mold tends to enter through the footing, between the footing and the walls, right through the block walls, and through cracks in poured walls.After the moisture seeps in, it lies in puddles. These puddles then slowly evaporate upward into the house. The way to control mold in our homes is to control the moisture. Dirt basements with vents tend to be so dangerous because these vents let in moisture. Mold worsens health issues for the many people struggling with asthma and allergies.

Reducing the moisture in your home's crawl space is important for maintaining a healthy home and your home's value.Dust mite droppings are the number one allergen causing the most trouble for people with asthma and allergies. Dust mites are microscopic parasites that eat dead skin and thrive in humid environments. A moisture filled basement is a perfect environment for these allergens to live.There are also many unwanted critters that move into moist crawl spaces such as termites, spiders, mice, rats and snakes. As we can see, it's a food chain that can attract more and more unwanted varmint into your house. Unfortunately, these varmints live and die in your crawl space-sometimes producing very foul and unwelcoming odors.

An optimally sealed crawl space vent covers requires some construction techniques to be implemented to reduce the probability of termites accessing the floor system of a building. One of the long time deterrents to these pests has been the termite shield, and it still has a use today. The shield is a metal sheet that is placed over the top of the foundation blocks before the floor framing is done. Termites can't penetrate it as long as nothing punches a hole through it.If embeds are in the blocks for bolting the mud sill on the top, provisions must be made to seal around those penetrations. The termite shield projects past the concrete block under the building, so once termites make their way underground to the block, they would have to crawl out of the block and go around the shield to get to the wood.

Sealing a crawl space means placing a heavy polyethylene film that completely covers the soil and running it up the interior crawl space foundation blocks to a level that is above the grade of soil at the exterior of the building. Then an insulation board is placed on the foundation and sealed to prevent any moisture from entering the building. The sealer can be a spray-applied form of cellulose insulation containing a borate additive that also serves as a non-hazardous termiticide.Many homes use the Sentricon bait system for added protection. This works by placing wood products in special monitoring stations that have slow acting termiticides in them.

The insulation of the foundation walls using the sealed method is less costly and more energy efficient than placing insulation on the floor's underside above the crawl space. If the floor is constructed of open web trusses, the ineffectiveness is even more so using the vented method because a continuous thermal barrier cannot be created.However, termites have no desire to exit a damp and dark environment and expose themselves to the light.Foraging termites find these food sources and take them back to their colonies. The poison has the potential to wipe out entire colonies of termites.