First Floor Wood Stove - No heat in basement

[Draughts15]

Hi all,

Just got my stove installed last week and will post a review soon.. Wondering if anyone has any experience with having a wood stove on the first floor and an unfinished basement. The stove is awesome and keeps the first floor of out elevated ranch around 72-75. I am a little nervous about our basement. It gets very cold and this is where all of our plumbing/pipes are. The basement has 8ft-9ft ceilings and four vents from our propane furnace spanning the 1400 sq ft. I would guess about 6ft of the basement walls are underground. We just moved in last winter and when Temps were -20s and -teens for highs the coldest it got was 60 degrees. Of course the furnace was running frequently. Now I could very well not use the furnace at all but just yesterday I brought a thermometer down and it read 50 degrees. I cycled the fan on the furnace for an hour and it didn't make a difference. The next experiment was bringing a box fan down and blowing cold air up the stairs and within an hour it rose 4 degrees. Anyone think my basement could freeze? I'm MN and Temps are currently dropping to about 0. Next fall I plan on finishing most of the basement and insulating the rim joists with spray foam. Thanks for the help.

 

[begreen]

It's a good idea to let the furnace cycle at least a few times a day to keep the basement above freezing. It also helps to have an inexpensive remote thermometer sensor down there so that you can keep an eye on temps. Another option is to put an electric space heater in the basement that has a low temp setting.

 

[enordy]

It's a good idea to let the furnace cycle at least a few times a day to keep the basement above freezing. It also helps to have an inexpensive remote thermometer sensor down there so that you can keep an eye on temps. Another option is to put an electric space heater in the basement that has a low temp setting.

I have a similar situation, but the unfinished space where the plumbing and furnace are located is not that large, maybe 100 sq.ft. Because of the smaller size of my stove, I don't get overnight burns. I set the house thermostat to 58F during the overnight to keep that space above freezing.

I also have a space heater plugged into this temp controller, with hi-low setpoints at 45F and 37F, just in case its crazy-cold down there during the day or the furnace fails to kick on overnight (which would be another issue in itself!)...

Amazon product ASIN B07BFR1Z4B

 

[DuaeGuttae]

The home in which I grew up and where my mother still lives is a single-story home with an unfinished basement underneath. A larger percentage of the walls are underground, but from about 1976 onward that home has been heated almost exclusively with a Lange woodstove. No heat from upstairs makes it downstairs. There is an oil furnace, but it rarely ran in my youth. Now that my mom is 85 she lets it come on every so often, but it’s still pretty rare. The home is in Virginia, not Minnesota. Freezing temperatures are not unusual, but there is not an issue with long-lasting sub zero temperatures. On rare occasions the pipe from the well pump room has frozen (but thankfully not burst), and my mother puts an electric space heater in there to deal with that if necessary. The oil furnace has no ducts into her basement.

Is there any reason that you couldn’t let the basement run cold but not freezing? My mother uses her basement to store canned food and as a root cellar for potatoes and sweet potatoes, and she likes keeping it cool. She doesn’t “hang out” down there other than when she is working. You say your basement is unfinished, so I would think you’re not spending time down there for living. I would think you’d be safe monitoring the temperature and letting it get cool and taking action only if it seems in danger of freezing. If the weather turns exceptionally cold with a polar vortex, you could take steps to heat it up with the furnace or a space heater.

The danger I would see is if you are entirely reliant on having electricity to heat the space in the middle of a cold snap, and it’s likely that you wouldn’t. How reliable is the electric service to your home? Do you have a generator that you could use to run some sort of heat to the basement in an emergency?

 

[hansenjw]

If you have a furnace, you may be able to run it in fan-only mode to move the warm air around. If your current thermostat doesn’t support that, a new one might. I have a new Lennox and it supports it.

 

[Vg3200p]

What I do. And this is just for now until I get a se cond stove for basement. Is have my thermostat in my basement. And I set this as low as it goes Which is 40deg. I had ripped all the ducting out when I replaced furnace and just have 1 supply to basement and 1 supply to 1st floor. We've gotten down to 19 here and it hasn't kicked on yet

 

[MR. GLO]

I think if you blow the cold air up you will still need vent at other end to bring warmer cold air down...

I have a basement stove and the other end gets cold.

govee wifi thermometer have history readings to help track fans..

50 is cold. 58 is the lowest I go with bathroom in basement. I put a small electric strip heater with a nest thermostat and relay as backup.

All depends how close pipes are to exterior sill and air leakage.

 

[stoveliker]

To get heat down, it is important to have a "circuit" for the air to travel.

My suggestion is to add a vent register thru the floor in a inconspicuous location. Then add a (inline) fan and suck warm (but not the warmest) air from the floor of the main floor. Then in the basement, I would add a (flexible) duct and blow out then warm air at the floor level of the basement.

If you put the fan on the basement end of the duct, you'll not hear much upstairs.

Blowing the warmer air at floor level into the basement makes sure it does not only reside at the ceiling of the basement.

You could add a thermostat in the basement to run the fan in the temperature interval you want it to run.

 

[Draughts15]

Thank you all for the replies. Right now I'm not loading in the mornings before work and have the thermostat set to 67. Today when I came home the temp a foot off the floor was 54.

Our wood stove is in our living room which is a large rectangle area with the wood stove on one end. My plan was to get an inline fan and disconnect the duct in the floor joist to suck up cold air from the basement. From here, I think the colder (warmer air) would flow down the stairs on the opposite end of the living room creating a connection. If it doesn't work, I can reconnect the duct and try it elsewhere.

I am going to invest in some thermometers to keep an eye on the Temps.

Unfortunately, running the fan on our furnace for an hour did not change the temp in the basement. I've tried the same thing in the summer hoping we could get the cold air upstairs, which also didn't work. I found running a box fan pointed up really cooled the house.

 

[rdust]

Haven’t had heat in my unfinished basement since 2009 when I installed my first stove. It never gets below 50, a long way from freeze worries.

 

[peakbagger]

The temperature of the ground is usually in the mid forties 6 feet below the ground. If you have insulation on the exposed section of wall and 3 or 4 feet down its pretty rare if the basement is going to go below freezing with one big "IF". The IF is that the basement is fairly tight from drafts. If you have holes in the wall or gaps in the sills, the wood stove upstairs is going to try to pull in lot of cold air through those gaps and if there are pipes near the air leaks then you can get frozen pipes. Ideally you have an energy audit done and get some foam squirted into the air leaks. The other thing to consider is if you have hot water baseboard, there are devices that run the circulator pumps on timed basis, this keeps the pipes from freezing in cold spots.

 

[Dave_in_ABQ]

what peakbagger said ^^.

get further below ground and the temperature stays more constant. Thats why people dig root cellars and why ground based heat exchangers work. No need to fight that, its difficult to make a basement warmer or colder without insulation. Its the cold at & above the surface that is an issue.

 

[MR. GLO]

While living in the home .my neighbor set her heat to 57 degrees with hot water baseboard pipes on the wall. They froze and then leaked. The temp outside was around 5 degrees but inside at the thermostat it was 57 in the room.

Don't assume the room needs to be near freezing to get frozen pipes all depends where the pipes are and air leaks...

 

[peakbagger]

Its quite easy to have a room thermostat set at one temp and have cold spots in the room that are below freezing. That is where those external devices that run the circulators on timed basis can really help as its usually only a very short piece of pipe in an outside corner with poor insulation that gets cold enough to freeze.