How long does your house hold heat?

[ChadMc]

Looking to make some improvements to tightening up our house some more. I’m curious what you guys have done to your homes to hold the heat better. I’m also curious how long the heat holds. Once our stove gets to the coaling phase our temps inside start to drop. Obviously at that point it’s time for to reload but I’m trying to work on ways to help keep the house a bit tighter. Thanks

 

[stoveliker]

Air sealing; attic, windows, outlets in walls, and where the stud wall connects to the concrete or block wall.
Then insulate the attic (after air sealing!).

Next get/rent an IR camera to see where you are loosing most heat.

I can't give you times that my home holds heat; depends on outside temps, sun, wind. Too variable.

 

[drewmo]

30 percent of your heat loss comes from your basement, if you have one. Air seal and insulate the rim joists first. Fiberglass insulations does no good if not properly air sealed first. Then insulate to at least 2 feet below grade.

Also check your chimney run into the attic. If you can look down to your basement from the attic along the run, seal that sucker up (with proper fire proofing, of course).

 

[Das Jugghead]

The majority of cold air infiltration in our home is from the windows. The windows are thirty years old and were damaged two summers ago by the company that painted our house - they used a power washer on the house and broke the seal on every window. We will be replacing all of the windows this summer if we can get the scratch together. Four years ago I added blown-in fiberglass insulation to the attic. There are four feet of insulation up there now and it made an immediate and very noticeable difference both in terms of comfort and the utility bills.

 

[thebaron23]

It hasn't been too cold here lately (-10c overnight, - 3c day) I burn a full firebox overnight and a full firebox in the morning. 2 fires a day and my house stays at 70-74 F.

House was built in 2003 and is very well insulated. Blown insulation in the attic is quite thick.

 

[kennyp2339]

My house isnt to bad, it could be better to, I'm still sticking to my plan of paying the mortgage off then taking a loan and doing a major reno w/ added addition

 

[Seasoned Oak]

Mine seems to hold heat for awhile for a 100yr old 3000FT home. Most winter days i can get by with 1 load of wood a day. Unless its cloudy or very cold i can start my stove at about 8 or 9 PM . 12 hours later most of the house is in the upper 70s and with no more fire in the stove slowly falls to lower 70s 12 hours later. 9 Pm i start the cycle again. Only If its very cold out or cloudy do i need to do a second burn during the day.

 

[ChadMc]

Reading what you guys are saying I’m losing heat quite faster then that. If I would start anywhere I would start with the attic. Are windows seems ok. I’ve been a working on the doors this fall.

 

[thunderhead]

With no heat sources other than incidentals(lights, a couple humans, fridge, etc) during average winter conditions(pretty tame maritime climate almost always at around 40F) my house cools at the rate of about 1 to 1.5 degrees F per hour. About 20kbtu per hour counteracts this and maintains temperature. 2800 sq feet, pretty good insulation, relatively new. Assumed interior temp=73f. Walls window and attic insulation is great. My weak spot is the basement/garage, but climate here is tame enough that im not going to bother improving that much.

 

[gthomas785]

I have a drafty 1820s colonial in New England. There is a small dug basement but most of it is on a crawlspace. At some point the previous owner sprayfoamed the underside of the floors in the crawlspace but only half assed it and didn't insulate the foundation around the perimeter. They also couldn't access under the kitchen so that's completely uninsulated. The walls and ceilings had blown insulation put in sometime ago and it is all settled. All the windows are the original 12/12 lite single pane with triple track aluminum storms.
The house is super drafty and I'm working on sealing it up bit by bit whenever I can. If I let my fire go out when it's less than 30 out, the temperature drops pretty quick I'd say 2-3 degrees per hour but I try not to let it get very far. I have my NG furnace set to 65 and sometimes I come down in the morning and it is running.

 

[Tar12]

I had a very drafty 1900 sq ft home with junk wood framed single pane windows and bad doors...I lost heat quickly in this place...year before last I stripped this place down to the bare studs...installed 1/2 owens corning foamular board and taped all joints then added Tyvek house wrap installed new double pane argon windows and doors and taped them and new siding..what a difference this made! No more floor drafts! This place stays so much warmer and cooler in the summer! Best investment i have ever made bar none!

 

[St. Coemgen]

Most wood framed houses do not really hold heat well. But it depends on construction (newer houses with sprayed in foam typically are better than fiberglass batted walls).

Our house is even a bigger exception. It is a stone house. It has a 60 cm (24 in) stone wall.

https://stcoemgen.com/2013/07/30/our-stone-house/

Lousy, and I mean really, really, REALLY lousy, at insulation (I have read it has an R value of 0.125, which is close enough to zero to be basically like zero). But great as a heat sink. That means, when we use to just come here for a winter "vacation" we could set up a blazing fire and the house was still bone chilling cold. Because the walls were cold and would suck up all the heat. But since we actually moved here full time and heat full time, after about a month of fall heating the walls retain heat. And do so enough that we do not need to fire any stove overnight, as the walls are a heat sink and radiate heat back into the house. At that point the house becomes more like an earthship than an insulated house. That is, there is more than one way to retain heat in the winter and massive walls are pretty efficient. Recent temps in the morning: -5°C (23°F) outside, 21°C (70°F) inside, 12 hours after the last stove fire went out.

But wait.... it gets better (or weirder). Even if outside temps in the morning are +5°C (41°F) the indoor temps is also about 21°C (70°F). That is the walls act as a moderator, and keep the temps always about the same. Which is pretty nice (and exactly like an earthship should do)... Oh, and our house is over 100 years old. Showing people kind of "got it" about "earthship" ideas before a bunch of people (*cough* new age thinkers *cough*) in the 60's and 70's were promoting theses ideas. That is, keeping houses warm has a lot of history. And a lot of that history has been sadly forgotten and dismissed in the modern insulation economies where a lot is now all about R values and "tight" construction which leads to indoor air quality problems...

 

[EbS-P]

I’ve been thinking about the holding heat aspect for a bit now. We have a 2000 sq ft brick veneered 1960s ranch with 1500 sq ft walk out basement. Insulation is average for the time period when it was built. 6” loose fiberglass in attic. Some batting in the 2x4 exterior wall nothing below grade. We are in the south. The exterior thermal mass (the brick) give us some extra time I think. For the first 24 hours of a hot or cold spell we do ok, but after that the Heating/ cooling demands really increases. If we don’t get any sun or the nights stay above 80 we push the ac/heat pump pretty hard. We have a two stage compressor so it’s hard to tell what stage is running sometimes. When it’s cold here I lose 1-2 degrees per hour upstairs basement looses much more than that I haven’t kept track down there. We decided to replace all the windows. Last spring. I think it helped but we won’t see the break even point of that cost for decades. I need to get up into the attic with a couple cans of foam and seal all the ceiling fixtures.

 

[Nate R]

I'm slowly building a 520 SF Cabin in NE Wisconsin. I went with an insulated, thickened edge slab foundation, and I'm wondering how much that will hold heat and/or temper a cool down overnight. I've also wondered how much the ground heat will help keep the inside of the building warmer than ambient when we're not there for weeks at a time. I've got a relative with a larger cabin nearby, on an uninsulated slab. He's NEVER seen the inside lower than 25 degrees. I'm hoping MAYBE my better insulated cabin will never drop below freezing, if I'm lucky. We'll see.

This year, I only have an exterior shell built, and open soffits/trusses right now. But, I have temperature data loggers in the soil nearby, in the slab, and I'm recording temperature and humidity inside and outside the cabin as well. Next year once I have it insulated and a little tighter, I should be able to start seeing how long it holds heat when a fire goes out, how long it takes the slab to heat up after being gone for a while, and just how cold the inside gets when it's unheated.

 

[DBoon]

It's a lot of little things to do in the walls, windows, ceilings and floors. Air-sealing tops the list, the beefing up insulation where you easily can (floors, attics). If there is no insulation in the walls (there wasn't when we bought our current 1250 square foot bungalow in Central NY, if you can believe that) blow in insulation. Often overlooked is air-sealing and insulating the double-hung window pockets (if you have those windows). This is easily done by removing the upper sash weights (and fixing that window in place, if that has not already been done) and putting foam insulation (2" is usually about right, I managed 2-1/2" in a house I am renovating) with a thin bead of spray foam or acoustical caulk (I used Dymonic 100) around the foam to insert to seal it.

You might want to check out Resource Conservation Technologies for all sorts of EPDM weather seals and Kilian's Hardware for all sorts of metal weather seals for doors and windows. I've done my fair shop of shopping at both those places.

 

[firefighterjake]

Some of the best advice I received when I first joined hearth.com was to insulate and seal up a home before buying a woodstove . . . that doing so would be extremely beneficial in both the short- and long-term. I took that advice to heart and added extra insulation in the attic, replaced or fixed some windows here and there and worked on sealing and adding more insulation to other locations in the home. It's better than it was (considering when this house was built back in the 1970s), but I know I can still do better.

Now as to the question as to how well does the house retain the heat . . . it depends . . . depends a lot on the outside temps. In the Spring and Fall the house seems to do a moderately well at holding the heat. In middle of January with the temps below the donut and the wind howling the temps fall quicker.