Home improvement with a lot of common sense and just a little bit of attitude. Improve your life by improving your home.
Home improvements that will help you save big bucks.
Published on November 7, 2008 By CyFree In Home Improvement

1. Dry your wet basement
A wet, damp and smelly basement is more than an eye sore or an uncomfortable space in your home. It might be ruining your whole house’s indoor air quality and might be adding a burden to your heating and cooling bills. Because of the way the air moves inside your home, that damp, humid and smelly air from the basement is consistently being sucked into the floors above, by what we call the “stack effect”. The heated air rises and escapes through the holes in the upper floors and as it does, the cool air is sucked in from the lower levels of the house, meaning your basement. As a result, 1/3 of the air you breathe inside the house, is that humid, smelly, mold spore and dust mite pellet infested air from the basement. And the humid air costs a lot more to cool and heat. A dry basement can be used as safe storage area, will not support mold growth and will be significantly more energy efficient, even without finishing.


2. Add room without building an addition
Since you took the steps to completely dry your basement, you can think of using it as more than a storage space. According to this article, "a basement is an entire  floor's worth of space" that can be turned into comfortable, safe, and dry living space for around 50% of the cost and almost none of the hassle of building an addition. A  finished basement pays for itself not only by increasing the property’s market value, if properly insulated it will make your home much more energy efficient as well

3. Encapsulate your crawl space

If your house has a dirt and or vented crawl space, you are loosing money as you read this, in ways you will not expect. The moisture from the ground and the air outside is getting in the crawl space, building up on every cold surface through condensation and slowly soaking in the wooden floor joists and insulation, creating the perfect conditions for mold growth. Mold colonies are slowly feeding on your wooden structures causing them to deteriorate and rot. Humidity is soaking the first floor carpet, warping the wood floors and sub floors.
The mold spores are being carried into your home along with all that humidity by the so called “stack effect”, which is the effect caused by the way in which the air moves inside every building. That humid and dirty air is being inhaled by you and your family and is costing you a lot of money to heat and cool. If you run ducts through the crawl space your energy loss right now can be as significant as 50%, meaning that a lot of the money you pay in utilities is being literally wasted. Modern building science calls for lined, sealed and conditioned crawl spaces. Encapsulating a crawl space is one of the most important moves you will ever make towards energy efficiency. It will pay for itself almost immediately in energy savings alone.
 
4. Install a basement dehumidifier

Unless you live in very dry place, you and your home will eventually experiment some kind of moisture problem caused by seasonal rises in air humidity levels. Muggy summers, rainy springs, winter snow melts. At least for a few months of the year, you will be dealing with some sort of moisturein the basement. And moisture usually brings problems. Humid air costs more to cool and heat, it creates a mold friendly environment, makes your home uncomfortable and sometimes smelly. Install a good Energy Star rated dehumidifier in your basement or crawl space to control moisture all over the house.


5. Install a backup sump pump.

If you have a single sump pump in your home, it doesn’t matter how good and powerful it is. In the event of a power outage, it will be rendered useless. And since power outages usually happen during heavy rain and storms, you will have no sump pump exactly when you need it most: when your basement or crawl space is likely  to flood. The damages caused by flooded basements and crawl spaces are usually significant and costly. The cleanup and repairs are usually difficult and expensive, the losses can’t be recovered, and to make matters worse, insurance policies usually do not cover losses from basement floods. And let’s not forget the health hazards that usually come along with flood waters. All this can however be avoided if you install a backup sump pump system including at least one battery operated pump, to kick in when the main pump stops working.


Comments
No one has commented on this article. Be the first!