Crawl Space Dehumidifier

It had been going on for so long that I didn't know it was unusual at all. My family was always sick – I figured that we just had bad immune systems. My youngest son had asthma, my husband complained of headaches, my daughter had chronic low energy, and I was always moody and depressed. That is when I learned about sick building syndrome, where mold and toxic spores in your crawl space under your house make you sick.

There was actually black mold, that infamous cause of various highly harmful diseases, growing beneath our floor. Without a crawl space dehumidifier or crawl space vapor barrier, it would slowly waft up and contaminate the inside air, causing poor health. The house always smelled musty too – I almost forgot that there were houses that didn't smell that way, and that that wasn't the way a house was supposed to smell. Once we installed the crawl space dehumidifier, however, the smell went away almost instantly, and within a few months, everyone was in much better health.

We didn't understand right away that we needed a crawl space dehumidifier, however. It was actually a fairly long process. The first I heard about it was from a friend who is an air quality expert. He walked in to the house, sniffed the air once or twice, and immediately looked at me. “You need major crawl space work,” he said, “at the very minimum, you need a crawl space dehumidifier and vapor barrier.” I was initially skeptical, but when he rattled off the signs of an unclean crawl space – musty smelly, chronic disease – I began to wonder if he was right.

Before installing a crawl space dehumidifier, I had him do standard checks to determine air quality. He put in an air quality test kit which, over a week, sampled the air constantly to determine the average air quality. When he had determined that it was poor, he went under the crawl space, donning a mask. He came out, his eyes wide with surprise. “Not only do you need a crawl space dehumidifier,” he said, “but major disinfectant work as well. I've never seen so much mold.” When he told me the price, I initially balked, but he reminded me that my family's health was at stake, and nothing could be more important than that. It was certainly worth the expenses of a disinfection, vapor barrier, and crawl space dehumidifier.