It’s not that uncommon for homeowners to hear strange noises coming from their crawl spaces during the night. These noises are most often made by pests and other creepy critters. From rodents to snakes, all kinds of animals might be looking to make their home under your flooring, in the comfort of the crawl space area.
These pests are all about causing damage as they nest, breed, and live in the buffer zone between the ground and your floors. Therefore, it’s essential to act quickly and not allow them time to cause you any serious problems. In the following, we’ll discuss why protecting your home with encapsulation is a step in the right direction.
What Kind of Pests Am I Dealing With?
Even if we can’t be quite sure what kind of pest is living in your crawl space, we can still list a couple of usual suspects. Namely, in North Carolina, you’re likely to come across either rodents, snakes, raccoons, bats, birds, and inevitably, bugs.
Rodents only need the slightest of gaps to squeeze inside, so it’s essential to fix even the most minor cracks, fractures, and holes when you find them. They might be more common in the winter, but nothing will stop them from invading during the warmer part of the year too. Mice and rats will keep their damage closer to the ground, but squirrels and chipmunks can have their eyes set on the upper parts of your crawl space.
On the other hand, if you have snakes, you don’t have to worry about structural damage. However, your family’s safety will come under threat. They’re mostly looking for a warm place and might hide between your belongings. If so, they could pop out once you try to reach something if they feel like they’re under threat.
Raccoons take the invasion game to another level. They’re noisier and their paws will tear down almost everything you have in your crawl space.
Bats and birds are a whole other problem. For example, bats won’t compromise the structural integrity of your home, but they will bring in diseases. Birds, on the other hand, will try almost anything to get out of your crawl space, damaging everything in their way. It’s key to contact your local animal service to remove them as soon as possible. After you do so, you can look into encapsulating your crawl space to create a barrier between your home and the pests.
Solution: Crawl Space Encapsulation
Crawl space encapsulation is a necessity for any home that has this type of foundation. Even if it might sound somewhat scary to some, encapsulating isn’t that complex and difficult to pull off. The whole point is to make sure that your crawl space doesn’t have any access from the outside. Crawl space encapsulation has numerous benefits, so let’s check them out.
Prevents High Moisture Levels
Although this might sound unimportant for your pest problem, there’s much more to keeping your moisture levels down than meets the eye. Moisture is your key enemy if you have a crawl space under your home. It will significantly impact your home’s overall health. From inviting pests to come inside to helping fungi grow, it’s something you simply can’t overlook.
Essentially, you have two main sources of moisture in your crawl space. The first one is vents. Most homeowners leave them open because it seems logical to allow fresh air to circulate freely throughout the crawl space. However, it doesn’t work like that. An open vent allows for moisture and pest to come in freely. On the other hand, the second source is a dirty crawl space. Even if most common in the U.S., this type will be behind excess crawl space moisture.
Making Your Home Less Accessible to Pests
If your crawl space vents are open, the chance of pests invading your home is very high. No matter how small the gaps in your vents are, animals will make their way inside. In addition, without encapsulation, there will be numerous entry points besides the vents into your crawl space. Snakes are most notorious for finding their way through the slightest of openings. But you can say the same for bugs as they’ll also come inside to live, breed, and nest.
Encapsulation will, in turn, be pretty much inhospitable for the likes of termites, cockroaches, ants, crickets, and all other pests that thrive on high moisture levels. For example, encapsulation barriers will help discourage rats and mice while also keeping flooding water at bay. But that is not the only benefit of sealing your crawl space. Making sure your crawl space doesn’t have any entry points will eliminate foul odors, allergens, and mold spores that can endanger your family’s health.
Lowers Your Energy Bills
Aside from making it difficult for pests to enter your crawl space, encapsulation will help lower your energy bills. Namely, if you leave your crawl space open, you will have higher energy bills. Some studies suggest that without encapsulation, regular homes will use up to 15% to 25% more energy to keep temperature levels comfortable.
There are several reasons why this is the case, and here are two of the most important ones. Firstly, moist air is much harder to condition. This means that your AC will need to work more when dealing with high-moisture air. Also, with open crawl space vents, the air you condition will simply leave your home. In other words, you’ll be cooling the outside more than the inside of your home. The same goes for the wintertime. Your warm air will leave and the cold one will replace it if you don’t encapsulate your crawl space properly.
Encapsulate Your Crawl Space with Professional Help
If you’re looking to minimize the risk of pest invasion, there’s no better way than to contact professionals at Tar Heel Basement Systems. Although they won’t exterminate bugs or catch rodents, they will provide you with the proper encapsulation of your crawl space. For the first part, you’ll simply need an animal service or exterminators in Winston-Salem, NC. Nevertheless, you can contact Tar Heel Basement Systems for your free inspection right now and make sure no such problems ever occur to you and your home again in the foreseeable future.
