Cold Floor Culprits - How to Keep Your Home Warm This Winter

Are the floors in your home as cold as the ground outside? That isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t normal. It’s a sign that there are air leaks in your home, and they could be in any number of places.

To understand why you’re paying crazy energy bills but still freezing in your home, first you need to understand the stack effect. Essentially: Heat rises. Thus, heated air will rise and exit your home, creating a deficit that pulls yet more air from the lowest level in order to maintain stasis.

The lowest level is often the basement or crawl space, and a poorly sealed crawl space means the air pulled in will essentially just be “outside air,” aka that awful frigid mess you try not to breathe in the sprint to your car.

You can see where I’m going here.

If your home is constantly pulling air in from the crawl space, if that air is cold, your home will also be cold. It’s like driving with the windows down and the heater on. Even the best HVAC system can only do so much, so it’s in your best interest to help it out.

Here are some of the biggest culprits that cause cold floors:

1. Leaking crawl space

This doesn’t have to mean there’s a water problem; you can have air leaks, too, although if you have air leaks in a crawl space you probably also have a water problem. You can solve this by encapsulating your crawl space with the CleanSpace vapor barrier system. If the cold air can’t enter the crawl space, it can’t get pushed up into your home.

2. Open vents

Crawl spaces should not be vented. Say it with me. Crawl spaces should not be vented. Despite old school thought that venting reduced mold and humidity, home inspectors are finally coming around to the fact that venting a crawl space is equivalent to constantly leaving your windows open - it allows air and moisture to enter at will.

External vent covers permanently seal these vents, eliminating a point of entry for the elements and adding another layer of protection for your crawl space and home.

3. Inefficient insulation

Do you have tufts of cotton candy-like fiberglass insulation? Yeah...that’s a problem. For one thing, air can move right through it, so it acts more like a filter than an insulator. Secondly, if you have ambient moisture (which you do, if your crawl space isn’t encapsulated), then the fiberglass insulation can absorb it, which will eventually weigh it down and cause it to fall out completely.

Crawl space insulation should be solid, so it seals off air access. Our SilverGlo panels are an excellent solution. There are many types of rigid foam insulation panels to choose from and they are all moisture-proof, unfriendly to mold, and offer the benefit of stability that means once they’re installed, they stay installed.

If any of these problems sound familiar, call us at 1-866-379-1669 and schedule an estimate and say goodbye to cold feet!