Crawl Space Water Removal & Drying in Tuscaloosa County

Red clay is the reason so many of these calls repeat. It takes water slowly and gives it back slowly, so rain shed off a roof in Holt or the West End sits in the trench that was dug for the footing and soaks sideways into the crawl space instead of draining away from the house. The same building standing on sand would have dried itself out by Tuesday.

The trench around the footing is the path

When the foundation went in, somebody dug a trench in clay, poured a footing, laid block on it and then backfilled the gap with the loose soil that had come out of the hole. Disturbed clay drains considerably better than the undisturbed clay around it, which means that backfill is now the most permeable route on the whole site, and it runs from the surface straight down to the base of your foundation wall.

Which is why the answer to most repeating crawl space water is outside the house rather than under it. Gutters that discharge somewhere real, downspout extensions carrying water ten feet out instead of dropping it at the corner, and grade that falls away from the wall for the first several feet keep out more water than any pump ever will. We say so when that is the diagnosis, because the pumping is the cheap part.

On a well, nothing sends you a bill

Across the south and west of the county, out through Fosters, Ralph, Buhl and Coker, houses run on private wells. There is no meter and no monthly statement, so the one early warning that everybody else in the country gets for a leak under a floor simply does not exist here. A supply line weeping into a crawl space costs nothing anybody can see and can carry on for months without a single bill to flag it.

What tells you instead is the pump. A well pump that starts up with every fixture in the house closed, or cycles repeatedly through the night, is moving water somewhere, and under the floor is the usual answer. Standing water down there during a dry spell says the same thing, since rain is not available as an explanation. Either is worth a look before it becomes a subfloor problem.

Under a manufactured home there is no crawl space, there is a bag

Manufactured housing runs right through Cottondale, Duncanville, Fosters, Ralph, Buhl and Coker, and it is built differently underneath. The floor system is closed in from below by a belly wrap, a membrane stretched across the bottom of the joists to hold the insulation up in place. It is not a sheet of plastic lying on the ground. It is a sealed pan hanging directly against the wood.

So water that gets into that assembly, whether from a supply line above it or from rising water below, has nowhere to fall away to. It pools in the wrap against the underside of the decking and sits there with the insulation, while the floor above it still looks fine. The wrap has to be opened at its low points to drain, the wet insulation pulled, the decking dried from below, and the membrane closed up again afterward.