Well, I’m not a mold expert and haven’t identified the growth here as mold, but if it is mold, here’s what’s necessary for it to grow:

• Spores – They’re everywhere and will grow if the other conditions are met.
• Appropriate temperatures – They like pretty much the same temperatures we do, and even colder. Ever seen mold in your fridge?
• Food – Organic matter is what they like, and it’s everywhere. Mold likes cellulose (wood) and the more processed, the better. Paper is called mold candy by people who work in this field.
• Moisture – To sustain growth, a mold colony must have water. When the relative humidity of the air is 70% or higher, mold has enough water to grow.

So, of the four requirements for mold growth, the one we have most control over is moisture. Keep the materials and the air dry enough, and we won’t have a mold problem.

Have you measured the relative humidity in your crawl space? When I was doing improvements on homes, I’d install a digital thermo-hygrometer with a remote sensor in the crawl space so the homeowners could track the relative humidity. If you’re not doing this yet, and you have a crawl space, get yourself one of these devices now.

OK, so you’ve measured and determined that you do have high relative humidity in your crawl space. That’s not unusual at all, especially in a humid climate like we have here in the Southeast. Where’s the moisture coming from? And why is the humidity in a vented crawl space higher than the outdoor relative humidity? Here are three reasons.

1. Bulk Water

The first problem to look for is bulk water. If there’s standing water in your crawl space, you have either a drainage problem or a plumbing leak. You need to fix this immediately. Having a pond under your home is a bad, bad idea.

In the photo above, the problem was that the back yard sloped down to the house, bringing water up to the foundation wall. Since it was just a crawl space, the builder didn’t put any kind of water proofing on the concrete block or grade the yard properly to keep the hydrostatic pressure from building up against the block wall. You can see the result here. This was a new house with a serious bulk water problem. The joists were already growing stuff, and the fiberglass batt insulation was getting heavy and falling down.

2. Moisture Evaporating from the Ground

In the photo above, the ground was partially covered with a polyethylene vapor barrier. The dirt that wasn’t covered looked dry, but when I pulled the plastic back, I found that there was a lot of moisture in that soil. The soil that looked dry only looked that way because it was constantly evaporating moisture into the air of the crawl space. The foundation walls can also evaporate moisture into the air.

What do you do to solve the problem? Cover it all up with a vapor barrier!

3. Outdoor Air Coming in through the Crawl Space Vents

Some people find this hard to believe, but when you bring outdoor air into the crawl space, the relative humidity actually increases. Think about it this way: When air enters the crawl space, it cools down. Cool air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air, so the air that enters is now closer to its saturation point (which we call the dew point). It might’ve been 60% relative humidity outside (relative to a temperature of 90° F, say), but when that air came into the crawl space and cooled down to 75° F, the relative humidity jumped up to 95%. Not good!

The numbers here come from the psychrometric chart (invented by Willis Carrier, the inventor of the modern air conditioning system), which relates temperature and humidity of air.

What Can You Do?

If you’ve got a vented crawl space with high relative humidity caused by one or more of the above, to solve the problem, you’ve got to remove the causes. Bulk water is solved by fixing the drainage or plumbing problems. Water evaporating from the ground or coming through the vents can be fixed by encapsulating your crawl space.

One thing that doe NOT work is to try to treat the symptom by installing a dehumidifier. Don’t do that!

If the problems get really bad, though, you can always keep some kayaks down there so you can get around easier.

See that little offset there right above the turn? If it looks like it’s not making a good connection, that’s because it’s not making a good connection. In fact, when the new EVER rater went up there first, it looked worse than what you see here because he’d already put the two sections near each other when I got a chance to take the photo. You can see a little better in the photo below right that even though those two sections are near each other, they’re not connected.

Yeah, this is happening in a vented attic, not inside the building envelope, so why worry about it, right? Wrong. You want those exhaust gases to get all the way outside the house. You don’t want them in a buffer space like the attic because it’s still likely they could find their way into the house. Exhaust fans and clothes dryers can cause the house pressure to go negative relative to the attic and suck those flue gases into the house, for example.

 
It’s amazing how blatantly obvious so many building science and combustion safety problems are once you know a little bit about how things work. Actually, you don’t even have to have any training to know that when a pipe is supposed to be carrying something from point A to point B, it has to be continuous for the something to reach point B. I wrote an article about duct leakage last year that shows some obvious problems that take only a pair of eyes to find.

The field test went well, though, and Luke Bertram of Green Summit Consulting is our newest EVER rater. He took our HERS rater class in February and was one of the lucky ones to have his training and certification costs covered by ARRA (Stimulus) money. The City of Doraville, Georgia is really on the ball and is getting people trained to provide subsidized energy audits to city residents. Here’s Luke in his Tyvek suit, about to enter the cave of mystery (aka crawl space) under the test house.

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1. How Blue Are You? PRICE: Free

This app from American Standard was released in April and is part of their larger campaign to raise awareness of water usage. It helps you calculate your water usage, the cost, and compares it to national averages. It also recommends more efficient products and offers quizzes, prizes and rebates.

2. Waterprint PRICE: Free

Waterprint helps you calculate an estimate of your personal “water footprint.” The idea is to break down your water use by food, beverages, products, and overall household, then calculate your usage. The app will also compare the water footprints of different items.

3. Water Buddy 1.0 PRICE: $1.99

This app was released in late March and is focused on making it easy for you to become aware of how much water you use.  You set a usage target for a period of time and then you keep track of your water meter readings. Don’t have a clue what kind of target you would set? They’ll help. And that’s a pretty good reason to try it out in the first place. Save water and money.

4. myUse PRICE: $1.99

This app, just released in April, tracks water, electricity and gas usage. It estimates your upcoming usage, so that you can walk by the meters and make simple adjustments, rather than taking more time to transcribe the data and transfer it to a spreadsheet. It also creates charts and graphs for a variety of measurements, allowing you to compare your usage to averages and keep track over time. Readings, charts and graphs are all exportable to email.

5. Toobz PRICE: Free

This one is for fun, but carries a lesson. The challenge is to arrange a system of “toobz,” or pipes, to allow the water to flow safely through the network you’ve built. As the levels advance, you have less time to build. Spill any water and you lose. Hmmm… increasing pressure to build efficient piping networks to fulfill water needs? This may be a game, but it sounds awfully familiar.

source: www.greenlivingideas.com

To heat and cool a home built for high performance, a professional builder can select top-quality heating and cooling equipment to ensure year-round comfort and energy savings. However, if the owners want that equipment to perform as designed, they must maintain it.

Fortunately, the proper maintenance of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems (commonly referred to as “HVAC”) does not require homeowners to be mechanical contractors. A few easy steps for preventive care, conducted on schedule, are usually all it takes to keep those systems humming at peak performance.

The vast majority of residential HVAC systems are “forced air” configurations. The system consists of a centrally located condenser along with a furnace and blower units that push heated or cooled air through a network of large pipes (or ducts) into the rooms of the house through vent registers.

A forced air system relies on other ducts to suck in and return air to the system from registers near the ceiling. “Return” air is either recycled through the system or exhausted to the outside, keeping the inside air fresh and comfortable.

Maintaining this system starts at the blower, which circulates a high volume of air. The blower contains a removable filter to prevent small particles and allergens from contaminating the indoor air. For most HVAC systems, the filter should be replaced every three months. Some newer, high-performance systems may have filters that only need to be replaced semi-annually or even just once a year. Consult your owner’s manual for frequency of replacement as well as size of filter. Filters of all sizes are available at most home improvement and hardware stores and are easy to remove and reinsert into the blower.

The next component to maintain is the ductwork. It’s a good idea, even in a new house, to have the ducts cleaned out at least every two years. In fact, most professional builders will offer or simply conduct a thorough duct cleaning before the owners of a new house take occupancy. Responsible builders do not want their buyers to be greeted with a puff of construction dust the first time the HVAC system is used! Two years later, the owners should contact a local duct-cleaning service or ask their builder for a recommendation.

On the same every-other-year schedule, the entire HVAC system should be checked by a professional mechanical contractor. Again, your builder can recommend a reputable service, ideally the company that installed the system. This check-up will ensure that the system is operating properly; bringing enough fresh air into the house, providing adequate ventilation and maximizing energy efficiency. Homeowners can do random spot checks by inspecting the outside of the equipment for any leaks, cracks, or other abnormalities and reporting those to their builder or HVAC service contractor.

This type of simple and inexpensive maintenance program will help to keep the HVAC system running at optimum performance for many years.

If you browse into your local auto dealer and peer into any model on the lot you’ll find a MPG (Miles Per Gallon) rating stuck on the rear window. The numbers should help you understand how much fuel (energy) the car will use under normal operating conditions. This info is a great way to determine how depleted  your wallet will be “before” you decide to drive that baby off the car lot. It might even help you budget for the purchase!

What about the home you’re looking to buy? How can you tell, in terms of today’s dollars, what the home will cost you to maintain? Wouldn’t it be good information? The info is available to you today. Right now. This instant…

Want to know more? I have the answer, and if you’re buying the right house the cost to know…is FREE!

Contact me for a detailed explanation of how a home energy audit can help you decide if the home you’re thinking of buying is a lemon. If it is and you just can’t live without it…I’ll show you how to make “lemon-aide”!

601-454-5559 in central Mississippi.

With all of these mounding issues it is evident that the new home construction industry is going to continue to suffer for several years. Many have thought that the Green Building focus would help bring the U.S. housing market out of the slumps, but there are just too many factors that are holding it down. So it does not look like Green will save the day.

The big concern that is not talked about in the many news articles is the fact that the U.S. is going to be faced with much higher priced material in the future. This might not make sense based on the low demand but a major change is happening in the supply chain that will have a dramatic effect on the price of materials.

First we have material supply yards closing at an alarming rate because they can not afford to remain open. Stock Building Supply has just completed a chapter 11 restructure with more than two thirds of its locations closing. BMC West is just going into chapter 11 and many small family owned yards are closing or going bankrupt. This is happening in lumber, windows, doors, roofing, drywall, electrical and plumbing yards across the country. The wholesale companies are facing the same problems. But this even goes to mills and manufacturing facilities.

The prices of many of home building products are based on supply and demand. The demand is low and the supply is getting lower. The prices of many products so low the mills or manufacturers can not make any money, so they have stopped production. When this market decides to turn around then prices will go through the roof, there will just not be enough supply to keep up with even the smallest increase in demand. This process will make it even harder for people to afford to start a home and slow the recovery of new housing starts.

So the next several years will be a difficult one for anyone in the housing industry.

My response:

Report what you see and keep your personal feelings out of the mix.

As property inspectors we’re hired to see and report the findings of the conditions of the home. Giving advice on whether or not to buy is not part of your job and is a very bad idea.

So…you don’t agree? OK…where do you draw the line? Will you tell them to walk after, say…3 items or 4? How many…is your number 12? What list of issues should you or do you use? When do you grab your client by the hand (or throat) and “get their attention”?

The most important aspect of what we do in this profession is communicate.

When we make determinations about what we see we do so from the facts which are obvious (the light does not come on when I flip the switch); we have the opportunity to comment on the color of the switch, whether it’s dirty or clean, if it’s cracked, and a list of other issues we could use to communicate the those facts.

When we take facts about an issue and mix our personal convictions we begin to transform the facts into philosophical ideas based on our own convictions. When we begin to introduce our own “personal values” we project those values in a manner that transforms the reporting of facts into subjective, philosophical ideas. We begin to dilute the facts into emotion.

When we include emotions in our fact finding we are no longer held to what we see but how we feel about what we see based on our own personal experience about the issue…and that is where the door is pushed wide open and “miss- communication” steps in. Why?

Because you won’t “feel” the same about what you see as another inspector will. Or a home owner. Or the agent. Or anyone else. When we use subjective observations we’ll see the issues from a completely different set of “values”.Commenting about whether or not someone should make a purchase is not why we’re hired, the facts become clouded by the inspector’s convictions, and the report is transformed from factual to emotional.

A home inspector should stay unbiased and keep his/her personal opinions to themselves.

One of the positive attributes of the Jackson metro market, or anywhere there are a number of inspectors, is that there are those who will openly give advice on purchase decisions.

But for this inspector, giving advice on the purchase is a bad idea.