What gauge on the stainless…?
When I say crawl space it’s about 5’ under the kitchen and living room joists…
I’ve got about a dozen Model A blocks, axles, fenders, etc plus some more modern 289 and 302 V8 motors.
A lot of that was stored when I was a teenager…
The surprise was seeing the possum and raccoon under there but opening 5x13 is big enough it seems.
Home is 2400 square feet and May PGE is 8.8 kWh average per day and .44 therms per day natural gas… single pane aluminum windows circa 1950’s…
As an individual I have never used a lot as far as utilities.
Sorry, I thought that you were going after the standard screened vents. If it were me, given the local fire risk (you might look at what Berkeley Fire Safe is doing for ideas), I would enclose it all with fire resistant material, Hardie board, stucco over fire resistant plywood, and preferably seal the space. I think fire hardening homes is here to stay in California.
@dieselscout80 The desired method to block the vents is a 2x on the inside, and a vapor permeable, water resistant layer on the outside covered by whatever your exterior material is. US construction being what it is, almost every home is not well sealed between floors, so enclosing the crawlspace stops air intrusion from the crawlspace into the home. To give some numbers for perspective, a 2,400sq.ft. well built home from the 70s might have 2,000-3,000cfm of air intrusion at 0.2" of water pressure (0.0004psi) of pressure difference, much of that from the crawlspace. A 20mph wind will generate that pressure difference.
So that's thousands of cubic feet per minute of warm, humid air that you don't have to cool, and then lose to the environment, nor have to heat in the winter.
I can tell you it makes an enormous difference to an otherwise tight house. I had previously sealed all of the pipe pass through with expanding foam, as well as all of the ductwork openings, and sealing the crawlspace gave us a six to tenfold improvement in the indoor air quality (AQI), e.g. dropping the house AQI to
4-8@2.5micron, when the outdoors was 30, and to an AQI of 12, when the outdoors was 160, and running the whole house filter dropped the 12 to 4 in half an hour.
In our case, we think that we are saving around 50% of our prior energy bill. Might be 60%. Not a small amount in my view. We did add 4" of perimeter foam insulation, and the installer that we were "eccentric" for wanting more than 2", but the marginal cost was almost zero, and it almost halves the heat loss.
For folks in rural locations, not just Western states, especially with trees, I think that getting rid of crawlspace vents by encapsulating the crawlspace, and ventilating it with condition air is a great way to harden homes against wildfire risks. It is also a great way to save on cooling and heating costs.
All the best,
Peter
