Crawl spaces cause more comfort complaints than anything else we deal with, and almost all of them come down to one design assumption that no longer holds.
Plenty of houses south of town sit on a crawl space rather than a full basement, so this is a job we do a lot of.
Older crawl spaces were built with vents in the perimeter wall, on the theory that moving air would keep the space dry.
That holds in a dry climate. In a humid one it does the opposite: you spend the summer drawing damp air into a cool space where it hits joists and ductwork and condenses on them. Being a few minutes from Lake Erie makes that worse, not better.
The result is a smell coming up through the floor, cold damp boards overhead, and framing that takes on moisture every year.
The modern approach is to stop treating the crawl space as outdoors and make it part of the house.
The vents get closed and sealed. The ground gets a heavy sheet, lapped and taped and run up the walls. Closed cell foam goes on the perimeter walls and the rim joist rather than between the floor joists above. The space then sits at roughly the same temperature and humidity as the rooms above it.
Floors get noticeably warmer, the smell goes, and the framing stops cycling wet and dry through the year.
A crawl space quote is driven more by headroom and hatch size than by floor area.
Eighteen inches of clearance, a hatch through a closet floor and ducting in the way makes for a slow, physical day. The same square footage in a four-foot crawl with an exterior door is a different job at a different price. We would rather see it than guess.
Standing water or a wet ground sheet. Existing insulation hanging out of the joists, which is a sign it has been wet. Rodent activity. Whether the ducting up there is sealed. Whether there is a sump and whether it works.
If the space is actively wet, that gets fixed before any foam goes in.
Send a photo of the hatch and tell us roughly how much headroom there is. That tells us most of what we need before we come out. See every service we offer on the Leamington Spray Foam Insulation home page.
We work on houses, garages, crawl spaces, new builds, greenhouse sites and farm buildings throughout the south of Essex County.
An attic is the cheapest comfort you can buy in most Leamington houses, and it is usually the first thing we look at. Warm indoor air rises, finds every gap in the ceiling, and takes moisture with it on the way out.
View Attic Insulation
Most calls about a cold garage in Leamington are really calls about something attached to it. The bedroom above it, or the kitchen wall it shares with the house.
View Garage Insulation
Closed cell spray foam applied straight onto the foundation wall does three jobs at once. It insulates, it seals the air, and at the right thickness it is its own vapour control layer.
View Basement Insulation
The insulation decision changed when the 2024 code came into force. The R-values went up and, more importantly, the emphasis moved toward airtightness and whole-building performance.
View New Construction Insulation
Insulation does not last forever, and in a damp climate it often does not last as long as people expect. When the existing material is wet, mouldy, rodent damaged or flattened, it has to come out before anything new goes in.
View Insulation Removal
Commercial buildings have a different insulation problem to a house. They are large, often steel framed, and usually holding a temperature a long way from the outside air.
View Commercial and Cold Storage Insulation
We insulate the parts of a growing operation that should be insulated, and we are straight with growers about the parts that should not be.
View Greenhouse and Agricultural InsulationBook a look at it. What comes back is a single page naming the product, the installed thickness and the total.
Which space, roughly what size, and whether water has ever found its way in. Prefer to talk it through? Call (226) 286-5239.
