dbarberic wrote: I wonder if the cold, unheated basement is contributing to the general sense of chilly in the house.
dbarberic wrote:-When possible, I heat using my wood burining fireplace insert on the first floor (maybe this will change the recommendation). But I still heat roughly 50-75% of the time using my furance.
Gerben wrote:If you burn wood, much of the heat goes up through the chimney. The air leaving the house through the chimney has to be replaced. So you suck in cold air from outside. This will go through your house unless you have an air inlet directly to the fireplace. If you don't have it: you might want to consider getting one. Otherwise insulation will not be very effective in combination with a fireplace.
Fiddlerdave wrote:YEars ago, we installed a franklin stove in the living room of our old house. When we would use it, te living room became too warm, and the house had baseboard water heating, not central fan heat, so I couldn't turn on the furnace fan to distribute it.
So I installed a duct behind the stove, up about 6 feet and open at the top, that went through the floor and just opened to the basement. I put a small suirrel cage fan on the bottom and a switch. WHen we lit the fire, we turned on the fan and blew part of the hot air into the basement. The living room didn't get too hot anymore, but what was truly amazing the basement warmed up nicely, and the floors warmed up upstairs! Even a back bedroom that tended to feel cold started feeling much more comfortable in very cold weather, simply from a warm floor. This effect would persist for quite some time after the wood stove cooled off, and when we burned it every day for 6 hours or so, the effect was around the clock, and even for days without burning wood the basement and floors were warmer.
My next house that I can customize will definitely have an insulated outside wall basement (but these basement was bare conrete walls, maybe they were a better heat sotrage), with some kind of heating (hopefully waste heat or solar) to keep the floors warm. It was wonderful! And it really only used the overheat from our stove with 7 feet of duct, 40 bucks including the fan.
waldo wrote:I doubt you're losing much heat to the basement (heat goes up) but take a surface thermometer and check the temperature of your first level floor. (Or just feel it, is it very cold?) If its, like, 55 degrees, well that's cold and perhaps insulating the ceiling of the basement is a good idea. Keep in mind you need some heat flow into the basement; you don't want your pipes down there to freeze.
SpringCreekFarm wrote:I notice you mentioned that you burn wood in a fireplace insert. Have you considered putting a woodstove in your basement and heating the house from the underground up?
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