First Winter in new home - Heating Solutions

[thebugman10]

Hey guys, new user. I purchased my first home back in August and was really excited that it had a wood fireplace in the living room. Flash-forward to January, my power bill for December was ridiculously expensive. In trying to troubleshoot my home heating, I discovered that my outside unit is not a heat pump but an AC unit only. I had been running purely electric heat. The following steps were taken: I cut off the air intakes in my basement so only the warm air upstairs is circulating, and I started burning fires more often in the fireplace.

I am struggling to keep the house at 65° without running the electric heat, and the fireplace cannot heat the house but just maintain it while I am keeping it hot. Me and my dad have a solution, and I wanted to check on here to see some of your ideas/thoughts as well. Our idea is to put a heater in the basement. We thought heating the basement would help heat the house through heat naturally rising, as well as opening up the air intake vents in the basement and using the central fan to circulate the air throughout the house.

We have two options as far as putting a heater in the basement: wood stove or gas heater. My house is 1664 sq ft on the main level and the basement is unfinished and 1664 sq ft as well (total 3328). I also have a vaulted ceiling in my living room. On some calculators online I have estimated that I need 80,000 BTU/hr to heat the basement+main level. I would be mostly buying wood (purchasing maybe 75% of my wood). What are your thoughts? Thanks!

EDIT: In response to some replies below, here are some photos of my current setup and basement:

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[sportbikerider78]

Welcome to the board!
Are you interested in heating with wood as a primary heat source?

What you will hear a lot of the guys from here say is that fireplaces don't heat homes well. They do radiate heat for the one room they are in, but take much heat from the rest of the house because they are taking lots of air and sucking it up the chimney. Your best bet would be to get a woodstove into that fireplace.

If I was you (also have an uninsulated basement) I would not start with my solution in an uninsulated space. Start in your primary living quarters.

It should be relatively easy to heat a 1600 sqft house in GA if you have decent insulation.

 

[thebugman10]

Welcome to the board!
Are you interested in heating with wood as a primary heat source?

What you will hear a lot of the guys from here say is that fireplaces don't heat homes well. They do radiate heat for the one room they are in, but take much heat from the rest of the house because they are taking lots of air and sucking it up the chimney. Your best bet would be to get a woodstove into that fireplace.

If I was you (also have an uninsulated basement) I would not start with my solution in an uninsulated space. Start in your primary living quarters.

It should be relatively easy to heat a 1600 sqft house in GA if you have decent insulation.

Thanks for your reply. I'm interested in the cheapest and most efficient way to heat my house, whether that be wood or gas. I have a walkout basement, so it is partly underground. I do have fiberglass roll insulation installed in the basement, I just don't have any sheetrock hung.

 

[kennyp2339]

First thing. if you want to save heat, stop using your fireplace, a fireplace while burning will take warm room air and use that to feed the fire (combustion air), cold air then enters the home to replace the warm air that went up the flue.
As far as a wood burner - I don't know the layout of your home, but it is almost always recommended to have a the stove or insert installed in the room / area that is frequented the most. I say insert because you may want to install one to replace the fireplace (providing that you have a conventional mortar and brick one.
Heating from the basement can be tough, between installing a new chimney, making sure you have sufficient draft, to moving warm air up stairs. Also since you say the space is unfinished I'm assuming that your basement walls (solid cement or block) are un-insulated, bare masonry is costly to heat up. I'm pretty sure that a bare masonry wall will consume about 1/3 of heat produced by a radiant stove. So figure if you burn 3 cords of wood through a season, you waste 1 cord of wood heat to the masonry wall.
I have a raised ranch style house about 1200 sq ft, partially unfinished basement, I have installed my stove in the basement, it heats the house pretty good but when the temps drop below 20 I have to run the stove hard to maintain temps upstairs. The stove does keep some of the floors toasty warm, but the heat transfer isn't like what you would think. I did install some floor registers thinking that heat would go through them and warm upstairs, again the results were not what I thought, it turns out that the cold upstairs air goes through the registers and moves towards the stove. My only real saving grace is my stairwell, you can feel what's called the convective loop there, warm air coming from the top and cold air oozing down the stairs towards the stove.
Long story short, if you have the space and your existing fireplace can handle either an insert or stove go that route before trying to heat from the basement. FYI if looking at installing a unit in the existing fireplace place keep in mind that you will need some type of liner whether its insulated or not. Again I can only assume what you may have or not have because there's not a lot of info to work with here. Post some info and pics of the house, take some pics of the existing fireplace and chimney, take a few pics of the basement where you think you would install the stove, take some pics of the outside showing the roof where the chimney would be, decided if your going to have an interior *best option chimney or an exterior chimney. Good luck and be sure to ask many questions, there's a ton of good info here.

 

[Nick Mystic]

Welcome thebugman10,
How much of a financial investment are you willing to make to heat your house effectively with wood? From what you posted about your situation it sounds like you would need to spend a minimum of around $2k to get an inexpensive stove and chimney liner, assuming you are handy with tools and willing to learn enough about installing a stove/insert that you could do the installation yourself. You could reduce the cost a little bit if you were able to pick up a used stove at a decent price, but often that is risky for someone new to burning since you wouldn't know what to look for in evaluating whether or not a particular stove was a good deal or a worn out stove.

As sportbikerider78 said, you would do much better planning on putting a stove or insert upstairs utilizing your existing fireplace and chimney rather than try to heat from an unfinished basement. If you do some research you'll quickly learn how difficult it is to move warm air from a basement to the upstairs using the existing duct work for a HVAC system. Much of the air you warm up with a stove in your basement will go towards warming the uninsulated walls and floor. By the time the warm air in the basement finds its way through your duct work it will likely come out luke warm, at best.

If you tell us a bit about your existing fireplace and chimney members will better be able to advise you on the best way to convert your fireplace to an efficient heat source by installing a stove/insert with a SS flex liner. A photo or two of your setup will help, as well.

 

[thebugman10]

Thanks for your replies. As far as financial investment goes, I was looking into buying a used wood heater. For the price of a new wood heater, I could be well on my way to putting in a new heat pump, so I was looking for something a little less expensive. I'm pretty handy with tools, and my dad and grandpa would help as well, who both used to be home builders. So I would be installing it myself.

I was avoiding putting a wood stove in my living room for two reasons. The first just plain cleanliness. The second being that my floor joists are spaced farther apart than normal, and the floor is sagging where the fireplace currently is. I'm currently in the (very slow) process of jacking the floor up and will shore it up once I have it level again. I wasn't sure how adding the extra weight of an insert would affect that. It's probably not a big deal, but just something I was thinking about.

Below are some pics of my fireplace (Heatilator insert) as well as my basement. These are pics I already had, but I can take some more when I get home:








I was planning on putting the wood heater in the basement maybe from where this photo was taken. Towards the center of the photo you can see the air intakes for the central heat. If I got a gas heater in the basement, I would probably put it on the wall next to the air intakes. Right above the large doorway is near where the fireplace is.

EDIT: Here's the exterior of the house and the chimney

 

[kennyp2339]

I see, thanks for the pics - Unfortunately nothing looks easy
Fireplace - Zero clearance unit - bare bones builders minimum, in order to do anything a total rip out is needed, The metal chimney would also probably need to be replaced with an all fuel class 1 (rated for 2,100 deg) - that's a bummer
Down stairs also looks pretty bleak - a free standing unit would need its own class 1 chimney, there seems to be no direct route for the heat to go being that your stairway is tucked into the back of the room that's semi framed with its own walls (lots of blocking of flow)
Duct work in all there, since you would need a chimney anyway perhaps a wood furnace that can attach to the existing duct work. Or maybe wing it with a large wood stove in the basement and hope for the best since you are in a warmer climate.
*natural gas furnace into the existing duct work is prob best solution if you have gas on the property

 

[thebugman10]

I see, thanks for the pics - Unfortunately nothing looks easy
Fireplace - Zero clearance unit - bare bones builders minimum, in order to do anything a total rip out is needed, The metal chimney would also probably need to be replaced with an all fuel class 1 (rated for 2,100 deg) - that's a bummer
Down stairs also looks pretty bleak - a free standing unit would need its own class 1 chimney, there seems to be no direct route for the heat to go being that your stairway is tucked into the back of the room that's semi framed with its own walls (lots of blocking of flow)
Duct work in all there, since you would need a chimney anyway perhaps a wood furnace that can attach to the existing duct work. Or maybe wing it with a large wood stove in the basement and hope for the best since you are in a warmer climate.
*natural gas furnace into the existing duct work is prob best solution if you have gas on the property

The bottom of the stairs are accessed by going through the large door frame into the other room. Here's a photo taken from he bottom of the stairs:

Natural gas is not an option, I guess I should've been more specific on that point. If I went the gas route, it would be propane with a tank. I'm too rural for natural gas.

 

[kennyp2339]

Its a tough sale because the chimney pipe is going to cost you figure $85.00 -$100.00 per 3ft section, plus the through the wall kit, plus the chimney anchoring brackets. Then the stove cost, btw - if your going to spend the money on the chimney then try to get a new stove, look at home depot's web site at Englander wood stoves, a nc-30 would do the trick for your setup. They go on sale periodically and there regular price is $899.99

 

[DickRussell]

Welcome, bugs. My first thought is that if that 80KBTU/hr heat loss is anywhere near valid for your house and design minimum temperature, then it's far too high for what I would expect for a code-minimum house of that size, by perhaps a factor of two. For GA, I would expect no more than say 40K. While it's possible that the heat loss calculation assumed some things that aren't so and give a badly inflated number, for that house to lose 80K would have to mean a poorly insulated house and one that leaks far too much air. Losing that much heat in winter invariably means that it is unevenly heated and thus uncomfortable in parts of the house.

So my first advice would be to have a good energy audit done, including a blower door test and IR camera pics, to quantify the leakiness and locate places where there is either excessive leakage or voids in the insulation. It makes little sense to me to address a huge heat loss by trying to find a cheap source of heat to squander at that rate. Fix the house first, and you'll have more and less expensive options for heating it.

The idea of replacing the AC unit with a heat pump is excellent, particularly for GA, where I would think that the right unit would not only be able to provide all the heat at design minimum temperature but also give you a seasonal averaged COP (coefficient of performance) of 3.0 or better, which would be the equivalent of straight resistance heating at a third the cost. NG would have been an easier sell if it had been an option for you. A good woodstove, rather than that fireplace, could give you nice supplemental heat, as well as the enjoyment of visible fire if it's in a room where you spend time. But unless you enjoy cutting, splitting, and stacking your own wood, which is very much a part of the enjoyment of burning wood, then I'd suggest you figure on using more conventional heat for most of the time. But first fix the house, so that whatever heating system you do install, even if it's a woodstove, will be sized properly for the sake of efficiency and lower installed cost.

As for those concrete basement walls, by all means insulate them as part of fixing the house, and don't use FG batts or any other porous insulation right up against it. Better would be rigid foam board, kept off the floor by perhaps a half inch. That would be covered with sheetrock for thermal and ignition protection in most cases. Here is a good link to start your reading on how to do it right: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/how-insulate-basement-wall. That comes from a more general link from the same site: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/how-do-everything, which a collection of links that ought to be good reading for you. Happy reading, and keep us posted.

 

[thebugman10]

The calculator was purely just based on square footage (including basement), ceiling height, and desired temperature above outside temperature. It was very simplistic, and I was really just using it as a starting point instead of that number being the Gospel.

 

[sportbikerider78]

I also think that energy audit and BTU requirement is WAY off. I'm heating my ranch with much higher ceilings and 40% more sqft in a very cold climate with the NC30 that is rated at 75kBTU. I can keep the house very toasty when the outside temp is 0F.
My insulation is nothing special either.

 

[billb3]

I've heated a house during the Winter with a fireplace and busted up skids so I know it can be done cuz I've done it. A lot of work busting up pallets and constantly adjusting the damper to have it open as little as possible.

I'd find the money somewhere for a heat pump too
then I'd save up to replace the fireplace with a wood or pellet stove heater if you enjoy that.

 

[kennyp2339]

I was thinking about this for a while, the least impact install would be a pellet stove on the main living floor.

 

[jatoxico]

I'm interested in the cheapest and most efficient way to heat my house,

So this is not a "I've always wanted a wood stove" situation.

I would be mostly buying wood (purchasing maybe 75% of my wood).

Buying wood that will burn well is notoriously difficult as most needs to be cut, split and stacked for at least a year to burn in a modern stove.

the floor is sagging where the fireplace currently is.

As said, I agree with those above that you should put any stove in the living space but planning and installing a stove takes time and you may have to do some structural changes to boot.You have a good interior location and it is possible that that pre-fab fireplace can accept an insert but it would be small if it's possible at all. Contact the manufacturer about that. *The current chimney cannot be used for a stove or insert. Better would be to put a freestanding stove in front of it but that will require adding a hearth in front. Best would be remove that zero clearance unit altogether and rebuild the entire thing with a free standing stove.

All those options will take money and time and even if you could wave a magic wand you're unlikely to be able to lay your hands on any usable wood. Given all of the above I don't see wood as a solution for this season since we are already into January.

If you can mange it, put in the heat pump so you have a good primary heat source. Then if at some point you decide you want to supplement with wood do it.

 

[thebugman10]

I guess another simple option, though not necessarily preferred would be to put some ventless gas logs in the fireplace. I would just have to drill through the fireplace to run gas lines.

(I know I posted this in the wood stove forum. I figured this would be the best place for comparing my options since it has the most activity)

 

[thebugman10]

So this is not a "I've always wanted a wood stove" situation.



Buying wood that will burn well is notoriously difficult as most needs to be cut, split and stacked for at least a year to burn in a modern stove.



As said, I agree with those above that you should put any stove in the living space but planning and installing a stove takes time and you may have to do some structural changes to boot.You have a good interior location and it is possible that that pre-fab fireplace can accept an insert but it would be small if it's possible at all. Contact the manufacturer about that. *The current chimney cannot be used for a stove or insert. Better would be to put a freestanding stove in front of it but that will require adding a hearth in front. Best would be remove that zero clearance unit altogether and rebuild the entire thing with a free standing stove.

All those options will take money and time and even if you could wave a magic wand you're unlikely to be able to lay your hands on any usable wood. Given all of the above I don't see wood as a solution for this season since we are already into January.

If you can mange it, put in the heat pump so you have a good primary heat source. Then if at some point you decide you want to supplement with wood do it.

No this isn't a "I've always wanted a wood stove situation". It's a "my power bill was too high and I need a more cost efficient solution for heating my home". Obtaining wood isn't an issue, I already have some and it's pretty easy to find seasoned firewood for sale around here.

 

[jatoxico]

No this isn't a "I've always wanted a wood stove situation". It's a "my power bill was too high and I need a more cost efficient solution for heating my home". Obtaining wood isn't an issue, I already have some and it's pretty easy to find seasoned firewood for sale around here.

First year in a new home can be tough. I almost died the first year in my current house. Was on the way to using about 2500 g of HHO. Made some changes real quick, got things under control and now supplement nicely with my wood heater.

As far as obtaining wood, it's not difficult to find someone to buy from or scrounge some up, that's the easy part. It's just that, unless you buy a pretty old stove the new ones require wood that has been dried to <20% moisture. Every wood dealer will tell you their's is and about that many will be wrong. In Georgia you can most likely dry your wood acceptably in a single summer if stacked well but that won't help you now.

 

[daleeper]

I realize that you wanted to self install, but for easy and most efficient, I would go ahead and install a heat pump, and probably a high efficiency gas furnace (not a vent-less wall mount heater) at the same time. If you really want to heat with wood, then maybe a wood furnace added to the above mix. You also need to cover those basement walls with insulation, they are sucking heat out of your house, as you have already discovered.

A wood stove in the basement will help make that space usable in the winter, but there is no guarantee that air flow will move heat to the upstairs without it being too hot in the basement.

 

[mitchell721]

welcome to the forums. several things come to mind. Bear with me as it will be kind of long. wood stoves are work. while a lot of us here enjoy it, its not for everyone. To go with a woodstove understand that your looking at the same price as a new stove and more in some cases in chimney pipe price alone. Now I don't know if you have the room or if you can put one in your current setup because I'm not familiar with inserts, one of the other members will better be able to inform you, but wouldn't the weight be ok if you have floor jacks in and are currently slowly raising the floor it should be properly supported now? Next is you have to weigh the options of wood stove/pellet stove if you truly plan on buying wood. If you have the means and the capability to get wood for free then I would say go for the wood stove because your getting btus strictly for your time you put in. Like they say firewood warms you twice, once when you cut and again when you burn. if you plan on buying your wood then there are things to consider. 1 being that wood is very rarely seasoned when it is sold, second is price per cord. you can usually get a pallet of wood pellets is usually around 275 a ton. third is that pellet stove installs like a dryer vent which is much easier. With that said. If it was me I would ask myself if I can get the wood for free to offset the overall cost of stove and install and if ji could not and I was truly in the position where I had to buy wood. I would consider a pellet stove thatd multifuel and see if I could find corn and pellets at a good price

 

[thebugman10]

Thanks for all your help guys. I think what I decided is to put gas logs in my fireplace insert. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to replace my outside unit with a heat pump. But also in the future, when I eventually finish the basement, I am really interested in putting a wood stove down there. I have never heard of pellet stoves, but that is also something I will definitely look into as well.

 

[Z33]

Thanks for all your help guys. I think what I decided is to put gas logs in my fireplace insert. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to replace my outside unit with a heat pump. But also in the future, when I eventually finish the basement, I am really interested in putting a wood stove down there. I have never heard of pellet stoves, but that is also something I will definitely look into as well.

Where are you located in GA?

I think the gas logs are a mistake honestly. I am also in Georgia and just had a new 2 Ton 14 seer Goodman HVAC unit installed for a little over 2k. With our mild winters and low-ish utility rates they really are the best bang for your buck if you aren't about the "wood life" like some of us here. In addition it will save you money in the summer over your old 10 seer unit and make the house more attractive to potential buyers if you ever decide to sell it at some point in the future. If you are close to the metro area I will be happy to forward my installers contact information.

 

[thebugman10]

Where are you located in GA?

I think the gas logs are a mistake honestly. I am also in Georgia and just had a new 2 Ton 14 seer Goodman HVAC unit installed for a little over 2k. With our mild winters and low-ish utility rates they really are the best bang for your buck if you aren't about the "wood life" like some of us here. In addition it will save you money in the summer over your old 10 seer unit and make the house more attractive to potential buyers if you ever decide to sell it at some point in the future. If you are close to the metro area I will be happy to forward my installers contact information.

I'm in Dahlonega, up on a mountain. My AC unit is a 12 seer Goodman, it's just not a heat pump. It ran great what little I had to use it last year (moved in in August). I definitely plan on putting in a new HVAC system, I just don't have the funds for it at this moment.

 

[Z33]

I'm in Dahlonega, up on a mountain. My AC unit is a 12 seer Goodman, it's just not a heat pump. It ran great what little I had to use it last year (moved in in August). I definitely plan on putting in a new HVAC system, I just don't have the funds for it at this moment.

Understood, welcome to the forum whatever you choose! Its nice to see more GA folks on here.