How many of your homes have basements??

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reaperman

reaperman

Member
Nov 1, 2006
169
Central Minn
I know that basements are somewhat geographical, but I'm not sure about the northeast part of the country. My newly build home here in Minn has a walkout basement equipped with a wood furnace in the basement. This is the first winter in my new home and my first wood furnace. I had a wood stove in my former home. It took some getting used to the furnace vs woodstove, but I think I have it all figured out now. My woods is 75% oak, 20% ash, and the other mixed. In the beginning of the heating season I kept loading my furnace with oak which was a bit on the wet side, and didnt do much for me. But I switched to dry poplar, a wood I used to snub at. A couple hours of burning and the house is 80 degrees. And a bit of hardwood added before bedtime. The fire dies out sometime before I get up because I cant wont fill the furnace up due to the house being hot already. I wont light another fire until the following evening after supper when the house cools back down to around 70. Thats right, my new home is insulated so well, it holds the heat at least 12 hours. But I will admit its been a mild winter here with temps in the 20's daytime. Which brings me to the my question about basements. If I didnt have a basement to heat I'd think a well insulated, one level home could be heated with hardly any wood at all. Happy burning!
 
Here in New England basement were first built of stone as a protection from Indian attacks Since the time of the pilgrams
 
Have a basement here in PA, stone wall, old farm house. Don't heat it, have furnace down there and freezer and a bunch of stuff! Not junk, just stuff! ;-)

Bondo©
 
I have a 1600 sq. ft. home in northern Maine built last year on a daylight (walk out) basement.
I did things a little different in that I put in-floor heat in the basement slab which I keep at 66 degrees and I have a wood stove and baseboard up stairs. I wanted the ambiance of the stove and felt it redundant to go to the expense of in-floor heat up stairs and then try and keep it from working by using the wood stove. I also get tons of solar gain.
The wood stove does a nice job. Topped it off at 10 pm. last night and had good coals at 6 am. The furthest room from the stove is our bedroom and it did call for heat some time during the night to keep it at 68 but outside temp. was -12 F.
This is the first winter here and I roughly predict using about 3 cords of wood (cut on my own lot) and about 750 gals. oil. I'd hoped to burn less oil but I have to remember I'm heating 3200 sq. ft. plus my domestic water. My last house was 900 sq. ft. and we used 900 to 1000 gals. of oil annually.

Dan.
 
Full basement here -even have a walled-off vented vegetable storage room. It's great for potatoes, apples, canned goods, etc. Most homes in this area have some sort of basement with the furnace and hot water heater located there.
 
My unfinished walkout basement has furnace, H/W heater, utility sink, my Harman TLC 2000 wood/coal stove and the foundation for the main floor masonry heater containing the ash cleanout. An area with a view is sectioned off with unused sheething hence is also a dog house for my 2 Newfies. They like the cold cement floor. They like the stove. They like everything. They're down there now but are going outside soon (FYI).

So, how's your mother?

Aye,
Marty
 
We actually still build them here as protection from Indian attacks. Must be working, haven't heard of any attacks lately :)

I am not from the NE, but here we have the problem of almost all houses are built with full basements, but are left unfinished when built to save cost. When the HVAC guys come in they size the units for just the upstairs living areas since the basement is unfinished. When the homeowner finally decides to finish the basement the HVAC system is usually sadly undersized, and therefore, you see a lot of woodstoves/pelletstoves added in basements (AC isn't as much of a problem since the basements tend to stay cooler).
 
An area with a view is sectioned off with unused sheething hence is also a dog house for my 2 Newfies. They like the cold cement floor. [/quote]

Two Newfies huh? Thats a houseful in itself. I have one St. Benrard, he too likes the unfisished floor of the basement. That is when of course, when he decides to come in for a while. But, when the heat of the woodstove catches up with him, and he starts huffing and puffing too much, he heads strait for door. He charishes the winter, but dreads the summer months.
 
elkimmeg said:
Here in New England basement were first built of stone as a protection from Indian attacks Since the time of the pilgrams
Click to expand...

Some basements served a second function in the 1700's. We visited some of the old homesteads in Pound Ridge, NY and found one home that still had the original basement kitchen intact. There was a huge fireplace down there. Story goes is that this is where they spent their winters. They took advantage of the tempering effect of the earth and found it much easier to heat that space.
 
I find it interesting Basements in the North East are pretty much a given. In Oregon where my sister lives on top of Lava flows if you wanted a basement you'd have to blast the lava out first so, a basement is a rare thing there. Here, it doesn't matter. Even if you're on Granite ledge they blast away to make sure the house has a basement. That's the case of a dozen houses put in some years ago. You can usually tell which ones have their basements built into ledge by all the "rock walls" made of huge boulders the houses have.

I find it interesting the term "Down Cellar". How many times we in the North East say "It's down cellar". You tell that to someone on the West coast and they don't have any idea what you mean, or can figure out what you just said. When you tell them, down cellar means it's downstairs in the cellar, their response is normally then why didn't you just say so, go back to grammar school down cellar isn't a sentence. Never thought about the term Down cellar before I had that particular incident.
 
HarryBack said:
actually, are you asking about basements or cellars? believe it or not, there is a difference!
Click to expand...

Sorry to go OT, but now I can't even focus on the question..... what is the difference between a basement and a cellar?
 
In the process of building a home here in south Pennsylvania with a big basement, poured concrete walls, concrete floor, bilco door.
 
ansehnlich1 said:
In the process of building a home here in south Pennsylvania with a big basement, poured concrete walls, concrete floor, bilco door.
Click to expand...

One issue with basements is radon. I was wondering if you are required to do a radon check first? Will you be installing a monitor? Or is that mostly an issue in western PA?
 
I think most older houses in the Northeast (and other cold climes) have basements. That's were the coal furnace/boiler was, as well as the coal bin. Root cellars were big as well.

I wouldn't be without one. Live on a slab? No way.

Radon is an issue all over the Northeast, BG, but it's hit and miss. You can have a hot spot and go less than a mile and have nothing.

The first house I bought was owned by a woman and her son, both of whom had been born and grown up there. Her father built it. Both are now dead, but neither died of lung cancer or other radon-related problems. That was my redneck version of a radon test.
 
I have a basement - pretty much bone dry - my office and music room are in there.

My last house in southern NJ was like a boat - that is, unless the bilge pumps worked, the place may have floated away!

I was very careful when buying this time to check the area and the ground water table
 
Got a walk in basement. Live on a hill, so the back and one side are below grade. The garage and an entry door on one side and 4 windows in the front.

We're on a granite shelf and the previous homeowner installed a mitigation system installed pre-sale. I think it cost him $1700 about 9 years ago. Basically, they sealed all slab penetrations, put 3" PVC pipe through the slab. There's an inline fan mounted to the side of the house with more PVC to about a foot above the roof line. Inside there is a colored water sight to indicate that the fan is working.

The house I grew up in, about 20 mins away, also had a basement with Bilco doors from the outside. In the winter, it wasn't fun having to go outside to get into the basement to do laundry. When my Dad grew up in the house they had a coal furnace with a big grate in the floor for heat. The coal would be delivered through the basement window. We were always digging up coal below that window when turning the beds for planting.
 
Metal said:
Around here basements are habitable, whereas cellars are used to store food/vegetables, wine, or for protection from storms (tornadoes). A basement is usually under a house, whereas a cellar doesn't have to be. Sometimes people use the terms interchangeably as well.
Click to expand...

Ok... that makes sense... I guess I've always used the terms intergangeably. Rhone - that's interesting about the "down cellar" comment... never thought that someone wouldn't undestand it.

At my house I have neither - just a crawl space that varies between 3 and 6'. This little cold snap we're having here has put a new project on the priority list... tear out the old insulation in the crawl space and re-insulate. In the 13 years I've been in the house - the floors have never been this cold.... most likely because we've never been this late in the winter and not had at least several feet of snow on the ground, which I'm sure had a huge insulating effect around the foundation.
 
OK - put me down for a full, walkout / daylight basement. It is semi-finished - insulation, and panneling in some rooms while a couple are just bare walls / concrete floor. I don't directly heat or cool it - in the winter it drops to ~55F or so and maybe 78-80F by the end of summer. But pretty much just storage and laundry room down there, so no one is really 'living' down there.

Corey
 
We have a unfinshed basement and that is where our stove is.
 
BeGreen said:
ansehnlich1 said:
In the process of building a home here in south Pennsylvania with a big basement, poured concrete walls, concrete floor, bilco door.
Click to expand...

One issue with basements is radon. I was wondering if you are required to do a radon check first? Will you be installing a monitor? Or is that mostly an issue in western PA?
Click to expand...

We used "form-a-drain" for our foundation footers, which includes a radon removal system, a pipe comes up through the basement floor and the air under the slab is pumped outside. New construction in my area requires a radon removal system, otherwise, most homes here are tested for radon only if the homeowner wishes to do so, or most certainly if the home is to be sold.
 
I should also count me in as a full walkout finished basement that wasn't insulated. My finished basement is complete with one bedroom (window is big enough for egress), it's own kitchen, dining room, full bath, living room, and another room that can be used for anything but a bedroom (window's too small for egress). I guess it's called an in-law apartment. Temps normally held 30-40F in winter, I found out cement has an R-Value of around 0.08/inch so the wall of the walkout was losing a ton of heat. I've been insulating the exterior of my basement with XPS starting with the walk-out side and boy has that made a difference. Normally if it was 0F or less outside the basement dropped to about 30-35F. So far this winter, hasn't gone below 45F.
 
We have a full walk-out basement on a hillside. Full basement wall on the front side of the house. Then the basement wall steps down on the sides, so that half of the side of the basement is fully framed. Back side of the house is fully framed. Half of the basement is windowless and contains utilities and storage. Other half is fully finished with family room, two bedrooms, and sliding glass doors to a deck overlooking the hill and the Wisconsin River. We have sandbox sand soil here, and being on top of the hill, water in the basement is not an issue.

This is the family room window view.
 

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I've got a partial. Just about refinished now. Just need 2 peices of sheetrock and about 8 peices of flooring and it's done. Then comes heat.
 
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