Do any of you have this problem?

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bill-e

Member
Nov 24, 2013
54
New Hampshire
So my stove is keeping my heat off virtually all the time and I'm worried about the cellar getting too cold.

My thought was to set my thermostat to turn on the furnace (via increasing the temp) like 4 times in a 24 hour period for say 15 min each. The problem is that both mine and every thermostat I read about will only allow me to do this twice a day (4 periods).

I'll have to experiment and see if that's enough.

How do you deal with it?

Thanks
Bill
 
I've got an old 1800's farmhouse in Massachusetts with a stone foundation. Last winter the cellar stayed at about 48-55F with the pellet stove running continuously upstairs. It was too cold down there to putter in the workshop for long, but no pipes froze up. Depends what you do in your cellar to deem it too cold.
 
I've got an old 1800's farmhouse in Massachusetts with a stone foundation. Last winter the cellar stayed at about 48-55F with the pellet stove running continuously upstairs. It was too cold down there to putter in the workshop for long, but no pipes froze up. Depends what you do in your cellar to deem it too cold.
my wife and I are huge fans of bubbles. sorry didn't mean to hijack the thread
 
I've got an old 1800's farmhouse in Massachusetts with a stone foundation. Last winter the cellar stayed at about 48-55F with the pellet stove running continuously upstairs. It was too cold down there to putter in the workshop for long, but no pipes froze up. Depends what you do in your cellar to deem it too cold.
Mark,
My 1767 farmhouse is in the Monadnock region. The house basically sits on a stone foundation with unheated crawl space until you get under the middle of the house and then there's the basement (hole for the furnace and plumbing) but it is open to the crawl space. It's basically a hole in the ground, no workshop there. I bought a remote temp sensor and I'm going to monitor the cellar temp.
 
Wire in a second thermostat from the crawl space set at 40 degrees and your furnace should kick on when needed. You can also apply the pipe warmers (electric tape type heaters that get zip tied to your pipes) and plug them in every November.
 
I had the same concern in our 1875 Maine farmhouse field stone basement. I bought about 20 cans of spray insulating foam on sale at Home Depot a few falls back, and went crazy sealing as many air leaks as I could find around the foundation cracks and along the sills - light an incense stick on a windy day and move it along the foundation walls to help locate the air leaks. I have a knee wall that is above the grade that I insulated w/ 2" foam board, and I used peel backed insulating tape and spray foam to seal the foam board junctions and irregular openings. I replaced the small hand made single pane basement ventilation windows and frames w/ thermal pane vinyl windows. I covered all my exposed water pipes w/ split foam insulation, and heat taped our washer standpipe to keep it from freezing, as it lays directly against the outside wall and was difficult to insulate. As some one else suggested, I put a remote digital thermometer in the coldest part of the basement to monitor the temps. Usually, when it gets below zero and the wind is blowing like stink, my pellet stove can't keep up so the furnace kicks in periodically, and that has helped keep the pipes from freezing up in the coldest temps (-20 F), at least so far.

I burn about 4 tons of pellets per winter in my Quadrafire Castile, which is a bit undersized for the living area I'm heating, but with some insulation efforts and about $700 dollars in materials, that certainly beats having to buy an average of 1200 gallons of fuel that the prior homeowners burned in a winter !!!
 
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Our stove is in the basement so no problems!
 
Same as the above posters. Our 1870 farmhouse has a fieldstone basement. We have heat tape on the water pipes in the crawl space and no problems with anything else freezing in the unheated basement. Last winter we even got to 30 below zero and the basement stays 50 degrees or so
 
Check out ThermGuard
Put one on each thermostat. Program in how many times you want It to run and how long a run and walk away
I have used 2 in my house the last 3 years and my problems of worrying about frozen pipes are solved
Best best about them Is If a zone calls for heat lets say between 12.00 and 4:00 and you have the Thermguard set to come on every 4 hours the clock will automatically reset
Jim
 
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