Dakotas Dad said:
Yep, if we ever build again, doubtful without winning the lottery, I am doing the insulated foam core basement walls. House up the road has them, warmest basement I have ever been in. Oh and.. And a Tuliviki in the basement and an equinox in the master bed/bath/suite. I have decided to not worry about code when I get rich, besides it can't be that dangerous to sleep with a stove in the room, half this forum does it in an easy chair or couch daily (or rather, nightly), just not in the bedroom
Working now on getting the basement insulated here, inside.
DD, from the items on your wish list, it looks like you're one of those crazy heat storage conspiracists... just like me.
We moved in here in late November, 1991. Small 3-bedroom home, but with electric baseboard heat. Niagara Mohawk gave me the records for the past five years electric usage, and I quickly saw that this wouldn't work for our income. January and February alone were close to $1200... 20 years ago when we were making 1/4 of what we earn now. There is a two-flue chimney in the house, with a thimble into the smaller flue in the basement. The landlord suggested that we put a barrel stove down there (farm country around here), saying he had one in his basement and it heated the whole place fine. I wasn't really keen on putting a contraption like that in my home, no matter how much heat it could produce. I told him that if he paid for the materials, I'd put up insulated walls all around. He agreed.
So the race was on. First thing I had to do was set my repair shop up, because that was our entire income when the kids were little. Then a friend gave me a stove, but it was in very rough shape, so I had to rebuild it from the bottom up. Plugged it into the flue and started shoving wood through it as fast as I could. It took about two weeks to get anything warmed up down there, but even then it was a losing battle. By mid-January, we were ready to make a sprint to get the walls up, but I had to work as fast as I could on my repair backlog so I could make up for the lost income. It wasn't until sometime in March that we finally got the walls taped and spackled. By then, the worst of winter had passed.
The following year was like a dream come true. Cheap heat, using only 4 1/2 cord of wood compared to the 10-12 cord we burned in the old furnace in the last place. All I can say is you need a mighty big stove to heat an entire house from an uninsulated basement. A barrel stove would have done it, but it would have sucked the life out of me getting the wood to feed it. R-12 walls all around make a
huge difference, and are a pretty cheap investment if you do the work yourself.
The heat storage capacity of sheetrock is nothing to ignore, either - about .5 BTU/sq.ft.-ºF. For a typical small ranch of 1200 sq.ft and an interior finished surface area of about 1000 sq.ft, that's 500 BTU stored for every degree you can raise it. The walls near my stove can reached over 100ºF 10 feet away. That's 30º higher than room temp, so it is will release 15 BTU/sq.ft. as it drops to room temp. Going to 2 layers of 5/8" rock will store 37.5 BTU.sq.ft. Even if you can only get the 300 sq.ft. of surface area up that high, it will be 11,000 BTU stored - more than a 300 pound cast iron or steel stove will store at an average temp of 400º. Then, of course, there is the other 700 sq.ft. that will get at least somewhat higher than room temp if they are exposed to the direct radiation from the stove.
Or you can hold off on the second layer and put a layer of 1/2" phase-change sheetrock when and if it finally comes to market. 1/2" of that stuff will store about
4 times the heat of a 1/2" sheet of regular rock. Have no idea about the price, but I suspect it will be up there.
None of this is free heat. You still have to use wood to get it up there in temperature. Still, it goes a long way toward maintaining comfortable air temps in the living space during the variations in heat output throughout the burn cycle.
