If you have a pier-and-beam foundation, you’re among the lucky few to have a higher quality home foundation. Most are made out of concrete slab. A pier-and-beam home offers better protection against shifting soil. Underneath the house, there will be a small crawlspace that gives you direct access to utilities like plumbing. It will have a dirt floor that allows the soil to shift. Concrete slab homes are large and solid. Like a boat, the entire house can shift when the soil shifts. This can create foundational problems every couple of years. You don’t have that. However, you have a disparate issue to deal with – vapor that comes up from the soil.
This is moisture that evaporates from the soil and gets trapped in your crawlspace. This excess moisture creates the conditions ideal for your foundation to rot. Over 90 percent of pier-and-beam homes have their beams made out of wood. The vapor itself is relatively harmless – it is just water. As you’re well aware, warm moist areas attract bacteria that will help quicken the rotting process.
There is a relatively low-cost way to protect your home from this vapor – install a moisture barrier under your home. This barrier is a sheet of plastic 10 mil thick that acts as a groundcover underneath your home. To compare, the thickest, heaviest duty trash bags that are usually reserved for contractors are three mils thick.
Having this moisture barrier will prevent mold and odor being present in your crawlspace. A drier crawlspace will do two things. One, the air will be healthier for you to breathe and easier on your air conditioning filter. The other thing that will do is maintain the temperature in your home better, saving you in utility costs. Since the crawlspace will be drier, your floors will also be more comfortable. Year-round, your floors will be neither too hot nor too cold.
Those are the immediate effects that you will see as soon as you install a moisture barrier under your home. Looking down the road, moisture barriers will also significantly reduce the chances of your pipes bursting. If you look under your home, chances are all of your wastewater from your entire house will feed into one large 4-inch iron sewage pipe. We already know that the inside of the pipe is moist. When the outside of the pipe is moist as well, the pipe itself becomes weak and likely to burst. Installing a moisture barrier offers a significant level of protection against the cost of the burst pipe – which can range in the thousands of dollars. Protect yourself and get a moisture barrier installed under your home.
