3 Ways Win­ter Affects Your Home

Jan 4, 2021 • By Matthew Stock.

Win­ter is here. Grab your jack­ets, hats, snow boots, scarves, gloves! Grab all the gear! Our sub­ze­ro tem­per­a­tures are on our doorstep! All that gear keeps you warm because the extreme cold has an effect on us. We shake, we get frost­bite, hypother­mia, etc. A com­mon ques­tion is how does win­ter and those low, low tem­per­a­tures affect your home? The foun­da­tion and struc­ture of your home is cru­cial, it lit­er­al­ly holds the build­ing up! Here are 3 ways win­ter affects your home!

• For starters extreme­ly cold weath­er is not good for pre-exist­ing cracks in your foun­da­tion. As tem­per­a­tures fall it caus­es the ground to freeze. The freez­ing soil may expand and push on walls to cre­ate cracks or pos­si­bly make them larg­er. This depends on how sat­u­rat­ed the soil is when it freezes. Anoth­er prob­lem comes in the Spring when the weath­er begins to warm up and the ground begins to thaw. Pre-exist­ing cracks will then expand mak­ing them big­ger and deep­er ulti­mate­ly allow­ing more water into your base­ment as snow begins to melt and rainy sea­son starts. Win­ter can also cause new cracks! As the soil around your homes freezes, expand­ing water push­es upward, result­ing in what is called a frost heave. This is not some­thing that caus­es cracks right away, but after years and years, this up and down motion can cre­ate cracks in your foundation. 
• With the cold air and the freez­ing ground cracks are not the only con­cern. This same recipe of events can cause a home’s foun­da­tion to set­tle or sink. These two terms are used inter­change­ably and mean that the home has grad­u­al­ly sunken into the ground over­time. Set­tling occurs when the soil beneath the foun­da­tion begins to shift. A tell tale sign of this is foun­da­tion cracks! Fan­cy that. Anoth­er sign is doors or win­dows that stick or don’t open and close prop­er­ly, gaps between win­dows and walls, even slant­ed floors. 
• Anoth­er win­tery issue to con­sid­er is ice dams. Ice can accu­mu­late on a roof dur­ing real­ly cold tem­per­a­tures. Ris­ing heat from inside the home can cause that ice to melt brin­ing the water down to the eaves, the part of the roof that meets or over­hangs the walls of a build­ing. Guess what? The eaves are not kept warm by the inter­nal heat of your home so the water refreezes and even­tu­al­ly builds up into a dam! This dam blocks water from flow­ing off of the roof and into the gut­ter. Once water is flu­id it will find any­where to go and will instead seep down your home and into the ground or pos­si­bly your basement. 

The good news, there are experts you can call to check your homes foun­da­tion struc­tur­al issues and fix any cracks before win­ter comes to head off the seep­age before it hap­pens. Tak­ing good care of your foun­da­tion is a great way to keep your home healthy dur­ing those cold win­ter months. 

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