This post first appeared on the Green Building Advisor Website.
When I first started working in the trades, back in the mid 1990’s, I was working for my brother as an apprentice electrician. We had an agreement, he would perform any work needed in attics, I got crawlspaces. Some of the work we were performing was on seasonal cabins that were being updated for use during Minnesota’s cold winter. These cabins were constructed decades earlier, built very close to the earth. Sometimes there were even stumps from the trees that were cut down to make room for the cabin that were left under the structure, in the crawlspace. More than once, I was sure the fire department was going to have to be called to extract me from under one of these cabins. Most were vented crawlspaces, some you couldn’t tell if they were vented or unvented, and very few had any type of vapor retarder or soil gas mitigation system present.
Continue reading “Choosing the Right Vapor Retarder for Crawlspace Encapsulation”