Crawl Space Ninja Show
Welcome to "Healthy Home ABCs with Michael Church," where we dive into the essentials of improving indoor air quality. Learn practical tips for fixing your attic, basement, and crawl space to create a healthier home environment.
Crawl Space Ninja Show
The Forgotten Space: How Neglected Crawl Spaces Impact Your Home's Health
Have you ever wondered what's really happening in that dark, mysterious space beneath your floorboards? In this eye-opening episode, we pull back the curtain on a real-life crawl space inspection in North Georgia with our Lafayette branch manager, James Derry.
When homeowner "Tom" called us about water intrusion and mold concerns, we discovered a crawl space with 62-63% humidity levels, fallen insulation, and multiple varieties of fungal growth actively degrading his home's structural components. Through detailed photographs and expert analysis, we walk you through exactly what we found – from the telltale white efflorescence on foundation walls to the distinctive "birdshot" pattern of certain mold types on wooden joists.
Beyond just identifying problems, we break down our comprehensive remediation approach: debris removal, insulation extraction, air sealing, soda blasting with food-grade sodium bicarbonate, and the application of specialized penetrating sealants. We explain why each step matters and how these solutions differ from less effective alternatives used by other companies. You'll learn why we prefer penetrating sealants to surface encapsulants and why proper dehumidification is critical to long-term crawl space health.
Perhaps most valuable is our candid discussion about maintenance – that forgotten aspect of crawl space care that can mean the difference between a system that lasts for decades and one that fails prematurely. James shares real-world examples of what happens when dehumidifiers aren't properly serviced and why our maintenance program offers something remarkable: a lifetime warranty on mechanical components that would typically wear out over time.
Whether you're dealing with crawl space issues right now or simply want to prevent problems before they start, this episode delivers practical wisdom you can use to protect your home's foundation, air quality, and your family's health. Subscribe now and discover why, as Michael says, "A dry house smells better than a wet house."
Check out Michael's book, "Crawl Space Repair Myths-Busted" now available on Amazon!
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All right, james, I appreciate you joining me on this call and this is James Derry. He is our branch manager and all things Ninja of Lafayette Georgia. So I appreciate you being on here, james, and, speaking of Lafayette Georgia, tell us when did we open up and what areas are you serving down there? Real quick for anybody watching.
James Derry:We originally opened up at beginning of October. We service just below Marietta, up into Cleveland, saudi Daisy area and the southern sections of Tennessee.
Michael Church:So you guys are a little bit Chattanooga, even creeping into some parts of eastern Alabama based out of Lafayette, georgia. So if you're in those areas of North Georgia and need some help from Crawl Space Ninja. We're heavy into foundation repair based on waterproofing. Tell us a little bit about that as well, if you don't mind.
James Derry:We do helical underpinning. We do do some resistance piers Depends on what your house is and what we're dealing with. We also do carbon fiber straps, which are quite a bit stronger than actual steel. Helps us to be able to stabilize a bowing wall. We do soil anchors to pull a wall back or be able to stabilize that wall from being able to bow in or shear. A lot of exciting things in the foundation field, Really a place that I really myself like to call home.
Michael Church:I enjoy foundation work tremendously Very good. Well, we're going to walk through an inspection that we did and we're going to call this homeowner Tom, and basically James is going to take us through what the inspection was like, what some of the issues that was found there. We thought it'd be really nice for you, as viewers, to see exactly what it is we're looking for, and then we got some after photos that we'll post. So, james, if you don't mind, take us through this home for Tom, what all was found and what the recommended repairs were.
James Derry:We were actually called out for water intrusion, mold, fungal growth, things like that. So one of the first things we like to do is talk with the customer and get the customer's point of view of what's going on and what they're experiencing. But then we like to be able to get underneath there and take a look at things so you'll notice where they've got the hybrometer out. We're looking to find out what that relative humidity is. As we all have learned through watching Mr Church's videos is that humidity absolutely matters. It can drive. The higher the moisture, the higher the chance for that fungal growth.
James Derry:That fungal growth can cause a lot of different problems, ie it can cause wood damage, health problems, a lot of different issues. One thing that we're looking for are the dropped insulation that we're looking at. You're looking at a lot of insulation that's dropping or hanging down over the time. A lot of things can make lint insulation do that. One, just not hung correctly. Two too much moisture makes them too heavy. That'll cause them to drop Age deterioration. In this situation like this, where you can start to see fungal growth, if you look around the blocking you can actually see where there's gotten some moisture to. That you see how you see the different colors in that blocking.
Michael Church:You're talking about on the foundation wall. Is that correct?
James Derry:Yes, sir on that foundation wall. So we're looking at an area obviously that's got very high humidity. We're at 62% 63% humidity in that crawl space. We're looking at an area where we've got insulation failing all the way around us. You're looking at a situation where you can obviously see that there's been moisture in this crawl space. Just looking at the lines on the cinder block wall, you see the white crusting that's coming through there. That's always good signs that we've had moisture Can.
Michael Church:I interrupt you just for one second, James. I think that's a great point you're making here. You know, the homeowner may or may not have a hygrometer, they may not, you know, even physically be able to get into the crawl space. But if you've got a decent enough flashlight, you can shine to the back of that crawl space and you can start to see that discoloration on the foundation walls, the efflorescence, the insulation falling out from the joists. Those are all signs of moisture problems. So you can call us out to verify, of moisture problems. So you can call us out to verify. But if you see these things in your crawl space, you should start being suspect that there's something going on down there and maybe have a professional take a look at it. Right? Would you say that, James?
James Derry:Oh, absolutely without a doubt. These are always signs to look for. The musky smells that you get inside of your home. Those are excellent signs. You have to remember that everything that you're smelling inside of your home, a good portion of that, is coming from underneath your house. When we turn on that AC system, we're going to suck what's in that crawl space right up into our homes.
Michael Church:Yeah, and you know that brings up another good point. I don't know who has a better sense of smell, you or your wife, but in my house my wife has a way better sense of smell, and who even has a better sense of smell than both of us is our mother-in-law.
Michael Church:So if you want to know really what your house smells like, call your mother-in-law, you know, have her come out and take a smell and I'm sure she'll be more than happy to share her opinion on what your house smells like. So anyway, that's a really good point. You know, and I always talk about this in our videos a dry dog smells better than a wet dog. I always talk about this in our videos A dry dog smells better than a wet dog. A dry house smells better than a wet house. So, just by lowering humidity, getting that crawl space or basement if you've got a flooded basement, anything like that, that you've got going on any type of moisture. A garage If you keep your garage door open and you've got a bonus room over your garage, like today it's raining and has been raining for almost 15 hours. So the saturation it's humid outside. If you got your garage door cracked, it's humid in your garage. The rest of your house is getting humid. So we got to control this moisture and it will control odor. So sorry about interrupting you, james, go ahead and go forth.
Michael Church:Hey there, michael Church, founder of Crawl Space Ninja. Do you have a crawl space or a basement, or perhaps your home is suffering from some type of indoor air quality issue. I want to encourage you to check out my book Crawl Space Repair Myths Busted, available on Amazon. This is a great book for any homeowner that is concerned about indoor air quality, mold, moisture, whether you're on a crawl space or a basement or a slab built house. This is a great book, great information. I encourage you to check it out Again. The name of the book is Crawl Space Repair Myths Busted, now available on Amazon.
James Derry:I think those are great points. I mean you can explore that with almost any structure that you're in, whether it be a slab set house or a crawl space house, those humidity levels matter. My upstairs humidity is completely different than my downstairs humidity, so all those things matter and it matters in any home that you're in. So, yeah, you're absolutely going to pull that stuff through, no matter where you are All right, very good.
Michael Church:Well, let's get into the mold Now. I used to shoot shotguns when I was younger and that mold looks like somebody shot birdshot at the wood. You see that picture right there. It looks really funky on that piece of wood, wouldn't you say yeah, it almost looks like peppering on there.
James Derry:Yeah, and it is one of the main ones that we're looking for. We're looking for that. We're looking for the white coatings, the white sheens, as you see in 1.2.3 and 1.2.4.
Michael Church:as you see in 1.2.3 and 1.2.4. And then you go down to 1.1.1 and look at that gray. It's a totally different type of mold. It's like completely saturated that piece of wood. It's crazy how different molds are.
James Derry:Well, and then you go to and you step down even one more to the 1.1.2. And you see the darkness and the saturation in that wood and what that's going to do over time, left unchecked, is it's absolutely going to start eating through that wood.
Michael Church:Yeah, yeah, that's right. So you know, one of the things people will ask me is should they have their crawl space tested for mold? And you know you can do that if you want to. But whether it's wood rot fungus or aspergillus penicillium cladosporium, it doesn't really matter. If you, as a homeowner, want to do a test and pay someone to test it and see what type it is Great, but for us we don't really need that, right, james?
James Derry:No, and there's really not a lot of need to it. Number one if it's mold, it's mold and, as you said, we're equal opportunity when it comes to killing, so we will kill it all. Doesn't matter what you're doing with chatter on stack. He doesn't really matter what you're dealing with. We're going to kill it all. So I personally do not believe that you need to have them tested. Do you know? It's mold. I've never seen a mold on wood or sticking to your house. That is a good thing in any way shape or form.
Michael Church:Yeah, and just so you know you DIYers out there, if you do want to test it, we do have the DIY test kit where it's a surface sample, where you can pull a swab out of our kit. You can swab the area, send it off to a lab. They'll tell you exactly what type of mold it is. In a crawl space you usually don't want to do air samples because it's not considered a living space. So surface samples is typically what we would do in a crawl space. So let's keep going a little bit here. James, what did the homeowner get recommended that we do here?
James Derry:If there's mold, we soda blast. If you're going a little bit here, james, what did the homeowner get recommended that we do here? If there's mold, we soda blast. If you're going to treat a tree, there is no sense in going halfway and going down there and spraying it with a spray that is absolutely not going to get it all the way off there. It may kill the surface mold that you have there, but I promise there's something alive. We need to get it off.
James Derry:First thing that we recommended we need to get the debris cleaned out of there, because there's a lot of it. One of the next major things we need to do is we need to get all that insulation out. A couple of reasons why we want the insulation out. Insulation carries moisture and it's not really something any other homeowner would really want setting against their wood. So we want to get that out of there.
James Derry:Plus, we want to be able to air seal that floor so that we can try to keep as much of this soda out of your house as possible. I'd love to tell you that we're going to keep every ounce of it out of there, but that would be a myth. We'll do our best and we make sure that we're sealing things and that we're watching things while we're in the house to make sure it's not coming up as well. So that's a couple of major things we're going to get started first, and then the Then we want to go ahead and start soda blasting. So I mean to go into a little bit of what we would do to soda blast. It's literally sandblasting your joist and your wood with soda and we will peel off that mold off of there. From there, what we recommend is to get into treating it with an actual cleaner and then with a sealer.
Michael Church:That's right, one of the things that well, there's many things that separate us from our competition. But, as you mentioned before, you know pulling that insulation out from between the joists so that that wood can dry. That wood has to get dry. You know, we're going to put a dehumidifier in there for a little bit let that wood get dried out. We're going to air seal, like you were talking about, and we leave the air seal of the subfloor in place, so it actually makes your home more energy efficient. Our mold treatment makes your home more energy efficient because we're air sealing the subfloor.
Michael Church:Now, that baking soda you're talking about, that is probably the greenest mold remediation product on the face of the planet. It's sodium bicarbonate, it's in your alkaline water, it's in your Tums, it's in your antacids. With enough of it, it's even in your laxatives, right. So it's a food grade, digestible product. But, like you said, it's under high pressure, high PSI, so sometimes it will get into the house, but even if it does, it's not that big of a deal. It's easily cleaned up. Now tell us you mentioned a protective. Tell us the important after all the mold's gone. Tell us the important of the protectant that you're talking about. Why is that a big deal?
James Derry:Number one. A protectant is going to seal that wood to protect it against moisture, so what we're actually looking to do is to try to keep that wood dry. The protectant also enhances your warranty with Crawl Space Ninja as well. So, there's two different types of protectants there's an encapsulation and then there's a sealant. We actually use a sealant instead of an encapsulant, because an encapsulant is basically a paint which encapsulates everything inside of there, versus just sealing it against the actual mold, yeah, and for the homeowner.
Michael Church:Basically, what we're looking at is a penetrant. You know protects the wood from the inside out. An encapsulant is basically just a sealant on the outside of the wood and of course we got the dehumidifier installed, but unfortunately it's a mechanical device. So you know, there is a chance for that dehumidifier to fail and it's nice to have that protectant on there in case that dehumidifier fails. And I always like to think of it this way If I built a deck on my house, I need to treat that deck with something. I need to paint it. You know you could paint it or you could stain it. So what we're looking at is more like the stain. We're protecting it from the inside out versus the paint. So just to give that a perspective, keep going with us, james. What else are we going to do here?
James Derry:With the encapsulation we are going to be putting a dehumidifier in. We actually put two dehumidifiers in this house, two E80s. Because of the size. This one was absolutely a pre-dry. The floor joist wood moisture was 18%, foundation wall moisture was 98% on this one. So we would absolutely come out seven to 14 days prior to doing the work place a dehumidifier, seal the vents to start getting this pre-dry. Once we were done doing all the remediation, from that point we would go in and start encapsulating it. This one. We did put two AVS fans in. One of them was a whisper fan. We did remove air seal and we did all the rim joist insulation as well.
Michael Church:Yeah, and two things real quick. Number one, if you don't know what the aviation fan is designed for, according to the EPA Indoor Air Plus program, they recommend that you shouldn't completely seal a crawl space. You should have some type of negative air blowing out a sealed crawl space, so that way you're putting the crawl space under negative pressure in case you have soil gases or radon. I've done a ton of videos about that if you want to look into that. But secondly, james, we saw that there was foundation wall moisture, but this homeowner chose not to do a waterproofing and we did recommend one. But I just want to, if you don't mind, tell people why waterproofing is important. Whenever you've got that 90 plus percent on that foundation wall, why is it so important to make sure you invest in that waterproofing?
James Derry:When you're running at 98 percent moisture on that exterior foundation wall, what that tells us is that there's a lot of water setting up against your exterior foundation, it becomes a very hard situation. So if you've got water coming in plus the fact that water is one of the most damaging elements we have, water gets through where it wants to get through. I can talk about waterproofing all day long, but what I actually do is manage water. I move water from one place to another where I want it to go. You don't want it on your foundation. You don't want it sitting inside your house because it is going to erode the soil underneath and you are going to end up with foundation problems. Encapsulation is not inexpensive. Foundation repair is expensive. In comparison, it is very expensive.
Michael Church:Well, not only that, but if, for some reason, that he chose not to waterproof, and there's enough water that gets in there to float that plastic or to get mud on top of that plastic, well, now we've got a whole different scenario. We've got to go in there and rip the plastic out and then waterproof it, and then he's got to pay to get new plastic installed. So it's one of those you know scenarios where you may have 10 years of no issue and then we get one of those 100-year rains which we seem to get now every two or three years now, for some reason, and then it floods the crawl space.
Michael Church:So if you're looking to have a worry-free crawl space. That's really what we're trying to do, but, at the same time, we can't make a homeowner buy something they don't want to buy. That's really what we're trying to do, but, at the same time, we can't make a homeowner buy something they don't want to buy. So all we can do is recommend and in this scenario, we recommended the interior waterproofing system or the water management system, like James is talking about, where we're managing the water, but they chose not to do that. So if this is your house, this is your forever home, you might want to invest in that water management system on top of the encapsulation. So very good, james.
Michael Church:Well, recently, this was back in 20, when was this? 2023, I think when we did this job no 2024. And then recently he had us come out. I don't know if you saw that we sent somebody else out there to inspect and they had us put some floor jacks in. Whenever you have wet wood and you dry it out, that day, wood starts to shrink a little bit. Very true, and you could have some settling or whatever because you know whenever homes are built, they're built wet.
Michael Church:The wood's wet when they're built, you know. So if you built a home 20 years ago, it takes a long time for that home to dry out, especially given the seasons of, you know, rain and everything else. So whenever you have a conditioned crawl space, that means the crawl space is dry all the time. The wood doesn't fluctuate like a open or vented crawl space. So I'm wondering if it would be either the soil, water, which is a great point that you brought up, or maybe the wood dried out. So, but regardless, you always want to put post checks in after you encapsulate the crawl space, because you want to make sure that everything's dry before you start putting those in, and I've done a lot of videos about that too. So anything to add to this one, james, that you want to talk about.
James Derry:The gentleman's been with us for quite some time. He's he's serviced it with us since he, since he put the system in.
Michael Church:Yep, tell us about the maintenance that somebody may want to do whenever they get their crawl space encapsulated.
James Derry:So one of the number one things I see when I go back to people's houses if they're having a problem is that their dehu has not been maintenance, has not been serviced. The condensate pump has never been cleaned out. So what happens is those rubber lines coming out of it that are feeding the water out end up clogged and they get hardened and water nothing else is going to pass through them. The condensate pump quits working. The dehumidifier starts dumping the water out on the floor. Eventually that starts backing up to where it goes back into the dehumidifier and next thing you know we get the phone call my dehumidifier is not working. Dehumidifiers are pieces of mechanical equipment. It's just like a furnace in your home. They require service Every six months, they require a filter change and they require pantry put into our actual condensate pump.
James Derry:What that does is that pantry actually cleans everything out of that condensate pump and flushes it through as it flushes out, so it keeps those lines clean. It keeps them fresh so that the water continues to move freely through there. It also keeps that water from backing up into the dehumidifier. Obviously, a filter I mean a dirty filter means you get less airflow. Less airflow in time is going to absolutely break the machine. When we buy a car, we maintain you spend $20,000 on a car and you put it through maintenance, you change the wood. You spend $20,000 on your crawl space. We forget about it. Got to maintain it.
Michael Church:Yeah, I think it's a good point. The homeowner can, of course, maintenance it themselves, sure, but if they get on Crawl Space Ninja's maintenance program, not only do we take care of it for them so they don't have to go in the crawl space, we're going to do a corner-to-corner inspection and we extend the warranty of the dehumidifier and the sump pump or whatever it is. We're main hits down there so you can have a lifetime dehumidifier warranty on our crawlspace maintenance program. Imagine if you bought a car and when you took it to the dealership and you paid them to change the oil and they gave you a lifetime warranty on the car.
Michael Church:I don't think people would be selling their cars if they had a lifetime warranty on the car very often. So anyway, it's a great program that we have and, like you said, that filter, if you don't change it out, it's like sucking peanut butter through a straw eventually, and that dehumidifier fan will blow, will mess up, just like your HVAC fan. If you leave that furnace filter in there and it starts to cave in because you've not changed it, that HVAC fan can burn up and the dehumidifier fan can burn up. So great information, james. I appreciate you sharing that.
James Derry:Absolutely Well. I mean, and like you said, with that lifetime warranty, I mean, where else are you going to find somebody that's going to warranty a police equipment that we know is going to eventually have to be replaced?
Michael Church:Yeah, it's a great warranty, I tell you so, all right, well, I guess that's all we got to say about this job. James, I'm Michael Church with Crawl Space Ninja, here with James Derry, and we hope you make it a happy and blessed day and we'll see you later.