When is the best time of the year to install a crawl space moisture control system?
Good afternoon
Michael Masserang here again and I’m here with Billy Mitchell and he is the owner of Intellivent and we’re continuing our series today on Encapsulation versus Ventilation and we’re going to talk a little bit about installation time as in reference to when is the best time of the year to install one of these types of systems.
Being that’s it the winter, this is certainly our favorite time to do an installation and there’s certainly certain advantages of setting up a controlled ventilation system in the winter or early spring that you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of in the summer
Billy, tell me a little bit about when you install a Atmox controlled ventilation system why do you prefer to install that in the wintertime.
Well if you think about the building of humidity in the crawl space that occurs late spring to early fall it is a better time to install in the winter because you are able to take advantage of favorable dew points, lower humidity outside and the air is better.
The Atmox benefits from mechanically importing good air and there is a lot more of it in the late fall to early spring so this is really the time of the year to install – you end up, the ability to run the Atmox system many hours a day which will dry out the crawl space a lot faster where if you installed say, in late May you’ll end up installing the system just in time for it to shut off for summer and it doesn’t get the full effect, the full drying effect and to that point when we install mid summer a lot of times the humidity and the mold conditions already exist and we have to … and we have to add a dehumidifier on to those and most of our winter installs very rarely do we have to have a dehumidifier which is the expensive piece of equipment that uses a lot of energy so if we can install them this time of year it saves a lot of money because we can leave the dehumidifier off the system and it usually will have good results without the need to ever run a dehumidifier on it, it’s just an advantage to the customer in most cases it’s a $1000 savings not have that dehumidifier.
Then one of the big questions we get, with the fan system installing in the winter will it make the crawl space colder. The Atmox has some savings built into it, it has a winter mode where it detects the temperature outside and won’t run and won’t import that cold air to make the floor cold, One of the concerns customer have. It doesn’t cause any adverse affects and benefits the crawl space so much to be able to dry out those joists and beams over the course of the winter and their nice and dry when the summer comes.
And that’s right, we often get calls from customers in the winter time where their crawl space gets too dry as opposed to the summer when their floors cup if passive air movement into the open crawl vents allows the wood moisture to get down to lets say 4%, your expensive hardwood floors could actually crack. So the Atmox program rides that parabolic curve and because of those safeguards enables us to keep those temperature swings tighter inside your crawl space as well as solving your crawl space moisture problem in most cases without that expensive dehumidifier that just bleeds energy. Also, if you are planning on, your floor system has any microbial growth, the fall, winter, early spring is the ideal time to clean that material in the dormant state and you don’t have to go through the inconvenience of a dry out period before for cleaning it. So it’s a win – win to install your system in the winter time and we certainly would be interested in talking with you about that.
You are welcome to call us so we can share with you more technical information about the system. But, mainly if you are looking a crawl space moisture program please continue to watch our movies in the series and also give us a call and we’ll be glad to set an appointment to come to your home and go over how the system works.
But again, my name is Michael Masserang, my phone number is (704) 787-6972 and this is Billy Mitchell and your number – you can call Intellivent at (704) 703- 3710 and we look forward to talking with you about that and we appreciate you watching this video today and look forward to talking with you soon.
Thank you very much.
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