Today we’re going to start a series about some crawl space myths. So the first one’s gonna be: Will bugs and rodents get in an encapsulated crawl space?
So believe it or not, I’ve gone on calls where our competition has told homeowners that once you encapsulate the crawl space, there will be no bugs or rodents in the crawl space. Well, that seems like a tall order to fill. I want to be a little bit more clear about that.
Bugs In The Crawl Space
When you encapsulate the crawl space properly, you will seal out a lot of the places where bugs and rodents can get into. But keep in mind, bugs and rodents can still enter the crawl space from above. If they get into the heating and air ducts or anything like that, and the ducts or the joints aren’t joined and sealed properly, you can get all kinds of bugs down in your crawl space from your living space. To say that you’ll never have a bug or a rodent in an encapsulated crawl space… it’s a little bit misleading.
Rodents In The Crawl Space
The other thing I want you to think about is here in Tennessee, we have ground squirrels, or chipmunks, like we like to call them. Did you know that I’ve actually seen where a chipmunk has bored a hole in the ground outside of the crawl space and popped up inside the crawl space? They go under the footer from the outside to the inside. That’s going be a difficult thing to keep from happening if you’ve got a rodent that can actually bore under the footer through the ground and pop up inside.
So if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We’re gonna rate that as a myth, that you’ll never have bugs or rodents in your crawl space.
I hope you found this helpful! Stay tuned for next week as we continue this series.
This is a lightly modified transcript from our YouTube video, Crawl Space Myth #1 – Critters in the Crawl Space… Will Encapsulation Help?