https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aucsNLmUCoA
Mark: Hi, it’s Mark from Top Local Lead Generation. We’re here with Mr. David Fairbairn of Fairbairn Inspections in Vancouver. We’re talking about mold. What an exciting Christmas topic David.
David: Just what you’re hoping for Mark, eh?
Mark: So mold in crawlspaces, let’s talk about it, where does it come from?
David: Absolutely, Mark. We’re going to see a lot of similar themes here that line up with a lot of the other mold talks we’ve done because the causes are still the same so I’d like to screen share here a little bit so you can look at what we’re talking about, so let me know if you can see the image that comes up here.
So here we’ve got a diagram courtesy of Price and Dunlop. Let me know when you see it.
Mark: Yes, it’s there.
David: O.K. great, so one of the things that you’ll see with every single mold related problem is that they’re all caused by generally the same thing. If you have moisture problems you’re going to have a mold problem and mold is a symptom of a moisture problem that is somewhere in your home. Crawlspaces are very, very sceptical to mold due to the fact that they’re extremely wet environments, they’re generally neglected a little bit; people don’t often go down into the crawlspace all the time the same way they do with checking their windows or even their attic. I would say the attic probably gets looked at a little bit more than the crawlspace depending upon how much storage is down there but here in this drawing we can actually see depending on the style of crawlspace you have it’s going to be extremely damp and you know, these are the areas where mold can really thrive. So we’re looking at two different floors. We’ve got one on the left, it’s a dirt floor and this is a very old style crawlspace. You probably are never going to see this in new construction or anything later than a certain date but if you go back far enough you do have these dirt floors and if they’re not ventilated properly you’ve got what’s called rising damp so that moisture is actually rising up from the dirt and it’s equivalent to here it’s says several gallons a day which I feel that that’s not wrong, so you can get this damage to the floor framing and the other thing about crawlspaces is there’s lots of wet wood down there for them to latch onto. Mold really likes organic surfaces and especially porous services so if you have something like wood or drywall it really latches on when you’ve got a lot of moisture and it set up shop pretty quickly.
So, on the right hand side you can see that they’re recommending you should have a vapour barrier down in the crawlspace. Now a vapour barrier is basically a poly sheet and you’ve probably seen them in a lot of crawlspaces and one of the biggest problems with these vapour barriers is that they’re usually not tight and here we can see it says seal at edges, that’s an important concept.
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