Looking for a tool to help keep your crawl space water-free? If you’re contending with more standing water than you are moisture, or increased levels of humidity, you may want to consider investing in a crawl space drain or an interior drain. An interior drain consists of a series of pipes that professionals will install within the interior of your home. Once in place, these pipes can physically drain unwanted water out of your home.
Interior Drainage Systems and Crawl Space Drains
When you’re considering how best to waterproof your crawl space, you’ll find that you have a wide variety of protective options available to you. That said, it can be difficult to distinguish these protective measures from one another if you haven’t worked with any of them before.
The interior drainage system establishes a perimeter of pipes around the interior of your home. The pipes collect water as it settles in place and drive that water far from your home to a nearby storm drain or trench instead of allowing it to seep into your crawl space.
The crawl space drain is connected to this interior system our experts will install around the perimeter of your crawl space. Because the interior drainage system can be customized to fit your unique crawl space, so too can our crawl space drains be fit in any spot in the crawl space that faces the most moisture damage. You can rest easy knowing that all our drainage systems will thoroughly protect your home from any moisture damage now and in the future.
Protecting Your Crawl Space With a Crawl Space Drain
How Does a Crawl Space Drain Work?
A crawl space drain is typically a perimeter drain that an expert will install around the crawl space. Essentially, this drain collects water that gets into the crawl space for whatever reason, which may include water seepage from the underside of the crawl space as well as water intrusion from the walls and floods.
Then, a crawl space drain should connect to a sump pump. This way, the water will go back outside the crawl space. Sump pumps are also a great way to avoid other issues with water intrusion. In general, if you want to keep your crawl space clean and dry, you’re going to need a sump pump, and a crawl space drain can take advantage of that sump pump.
The CrawlDrain™ Interior Drainage System
Installing the CrawlDrain™ interior drainage system is perhaps the best repair solution you can choose. This drain can collect and redirect any moisture that enters your crawl space and it is also guaranteed to never clog with debris. Its special filter facing the dirt will easily catch any mud or debris from entering the pipes, ensuring that water is the only thing flowing through its system.
Not only can this system collect any water that manages to infiltrate the crawl space, but it can also collect any groundwater that happens to well up from the soil, too. The perforated drainage holes will face what experts refer to as “the mud zone”, or the dirt floor most crawl spaces will have to collect this troublesome groundwater before it can flood your crawl space.
The CrawlDrain™ interior drainage system will then connect to one of our powerful sump pumps. This pump runs on batteries, so you do not have to worry about it suddenly backing up should your power go out. The pump will also activate on its own once a certain volume of water enters its system, meaning that it does not use more power than it must. Both the CrawlDrain™ system and our sump pumps will work hard to pump out thousands of gallons of water far from your home with ease.
Understanding The Damage That Can Befall Your Crawl Space
Your crawl space has more of a say over the overall health of your home than its size suggests. Any exposed pipes in your crawl space, for example, are likely to burst if overexposed to moisture throughout the year. Similarly, any moisture that makes its way indoors can find itself pressed up into the rest of your home courtesy of the stack effect.
Breaking Down the Stack Effect
Under most circumstances, hotter air in your home moves to the upper levels of your home. That air tends to rise because it is not as dense as cooler air. However, as moisture settles in your crawl space, the amount of cool air in your home can create a pressure difference between the lower floors and the upper ones. As such, that moisture can more readily make its way into your upper levels as your home attempts to re-stabilize. That transfer, related to the pressure imbalance, is known as the stack effect. It can prove just as dangerous to your home’s structural integrity as standard hydrostatic pressure.
Signs of Potential Crawl Space Damage
Once you start to question whether your crawl space needs protecting, you can better keep an eye on its overall conditions. Ideally, you’ll want to set up annual crawl space inspections with the professionals in your area. If you haven’t, you can keep an eye out for the following signs of damage:
- Damp walls
- Sagging walls
- Bowing finished floors
- Rusting floor and rim joists
- Standing water or ice
- Mold growth
- Warping door frames
- Fogging windows
Note that unpleasant smells can also indicate that something’s gone amiss with your crawl space. That said, all the symptoms can also indicate that your foundation has suffered from some manner of water damage. While you can keep an eye out for unwanted moisture yourself, you can reach out to area professionals for help if you’re not sure, specifically, where that damage originates from.
Non-Crawl Space Benefits of Crawl Space Drains
Of course, there are benefits to installing a crawl space drain outside of its drainage capabilities around your home that exceed the boundaries of said crawl space. Hydrostatic pressure, which can wreak such havoc on your crawl space’s structural supports, can affect the overall health of your basement and foundation too. It can cause cracks and leaks to appear throughout your home if it isn’t readily tended to.
Luckily, crawl space drains can help you end the spread of water throughout the rest of your space. You can choose to lengthen the drain you invest in. In doing so, you can ensure that even water that flows against the grade around your home or that otherwise makes its way past your defenses won’t cause problems for your home’s structural supports. Likewise, you can cut your energy bill and ensure that your home remains stable even as the weather starts to take a turn.
Crawl Space Repair
If you think your crawl space may have suffered damage, you’ll need to act quickly. The sooner you’re able to patch up this kind of damage, the better. Not only that, but acting quickly to invest in home repairs can prevent the damage in your crawl space from worsening. Cracks, for example, will only widen with time. If you let that kind of damage fester for too long, it can destabilize both your crawl space and your foundation, to the detriment of the rest of your home.
You should only invest in crawl space waterproofing, however, after you’ve invested in any necessary crawl space repairs. Crawl space drains, of course, prove to be excellent waterproofing measures, as they do not require an electrical charge to prevent water from reaching your home’s structural supports. There are other waterproofing measures available to you that you can stack with a crawl space drain. These include:
- Vapor barriers
- Crawl space encapsulations
- Dehumidifiers
- Sump pumps
- Waterproof insulation
Crawl Space Drain
FAQs
Your crawl space is one of the most sensitive parts of your home. It can fall victim to all manner of water damage, even if you don’t see a substantial amount of rain in your area. Hydrostatic pressure can cause cracks and leaks to appear not only outside of your crawl space but within it, as well. When you work to prevent that kind of damage from appearing, you’ll not only be preserving the overall value of your home but the health of your family too.
- Water Damage and Your Home’s Market Value
If moisture can make its way into your crawl space, it can pose a threat to the whole of your home’s structural integrity. That moisture can damage the structural supports in your crawl space while also making your home uncomfortable to live in. The stack effect, specifically, can direct unwanted moisture existing in your crawl space throughout the rest of your home and can, in turn, put the structural supports in other parts of your home at risk.
If you want to put your home on the market at some point soon, you’ll want to make sure you’ve done as much as you can to keep that unwanted moisture out of your crawl space. If you let water damage spread over an extended period, then you risk losing up to 30 percent of your home’s market value—especially if you don’t invest in repairs.
- Water Damage and Your Family’s Health
The same stack effect can put your family’s health at risk. Unwanted moisture throughout your home can aggravate some parties’ pre-existing conditions, eliciting allergic reactions or respiratory issues. Even folks without pre-existing conditions can start to develop allergies or related conditions if exposed to crawl space moisture for an extended period.
These conditions can all pop up even without the presence of mold in your crawl space. If any mold spores manage to take root, you may find yourself facing health problems that are even more serious. Most types of mold, if allowed to flourish in your home, can cause health problems ranging from a persistent cough to long-term lung damage. The faster you can work to prevent moisture from settling in your home, the better off you and your family will be.
Homeowners concerned about their repair budgets may want to explore DIY crawl space repair and protective measures before reaching out to area professionals. While, in some cases DIY home repair solutions help you save money, they can often have as many downsides as they do benefits.
- DIY and Additional Crawl Space Damage
If you’ve never worked on your crawl space before, there’s always a chance you may do more harm than good when installing either your repairs or your crawl space drain. Without professional experience under your belt, you can just as readily patch damage in your crawl space instead of attending to it. In these cases, that damage can fester to the point where it does considerable damage to your home’s structural integrity over time.
Similarly, not installing a crawl space drain appropriately can see your crawl space flood even more regularly than it already does. When you work with professionals, comparatively, you can rest assured knowing that parties with years of experience are working with you to protect your home from the worst of the winter damage.
Reach Out To IBA Professionals in Eastern Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota ASAP
Interested in installing a crawl space drain inside your crawl space? You can reach out to the professionals serving eastern Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, at Innovative Basement Authority to determine how these drains can best serve your home.
