Comfenergy Case Studies: Cold Kitchen Floor in Waterford, VA

Wednesday, May 8th, 2019 by Justin Dobson

Challenge

This historic guest house in Waterford, VA has always had cold floors, especially in the tiled kitchen area. The entire guest house was constructed over 100 years ago over top of a dirt floor crawl space. If you warm the crawl space below, then the areas above will get warm as heat rises!

Solution

Comfenergy completely "encapsulated" the crawl space with the following steps to make the floors above warmer: 1. We installed "TerraBlock" foam insulation on the dirt floor to keep it from "sucking" the heat out of the air. 2. "CleanSpace" 20 mil plastic vapor barrier was installed on the floor over the foam boards and partially up the stone foundation walls. 3. Closed cell foam spray was installed on all of the crawl space walls to seal them and make them air tight.

Now this crawl space will be about 10 degrees cooler than the living space above, instead of the same temperature as the weather outside (35 degrees this day!).

Project Summary

Evaluator: Andrew Garnsey

This beautiful, historical home in Waterford has a guest house that has always had cold floors.

Here is a picture of the guest house. Built over 100 years ago on a stone foundation and dirt floor crawl space.

Picture of the stone wall crawl foundation. Cold air seeps through these stones. Plus the crawl is vented to the outside to allow freezing cold air up under the floors above... NO NO!