Our house is ~1400 square feet upstairs and 1000 SF downstairs. Downstairs, 300 SF is the utility area and 700 SF is taken up by an apartment we rent out.
The (gas, forced air) furnace only has one heating zone, controlled off of a thermostat upstairs. Obviously that's going to make the basement a bit chilly when we install a wood burning insert 5 feet from the t-stat.
A lot of the duct work is shared between upstairs and downstairs. The basement is almost all drywalled, so getting access to set up a second heating zone is not a cheap option.
Is there a good, cheap thermostat that can read the temperature from a remote wireless sensor? The configuration of the house makes pulling wire a PITA but I'll need to control the furnace based on the downstairs temperature. If I have to run wire, that's fine, but I'd rather avoid it.
I could try to balance the forced air system with the dampers so that the basement is ~70 and the upstairs is a bit on the cold side. When the insert is running I could block off all the registers upstairs to keep things at least a little bit balanced. I don't want to do anything to damage the furnace by restricting flow, etc, though,
Anyone have an inexpensive way to deal with this problem? Other than putting an insert into the basement fireplace for the tenant to use?
The (gas, forced air) furnace only has one heating zone, controlled off of a thermostat upstairs. Obviously that's going to make the basement a bit chilly when we install a wood burning insert 5 feet from the t-stat.
A lot of the duct work is shared between upstairs and downstairs. The basement is almost all drywalled, so getting access to set up a second heating zone is not a cheap option.
Is there a good, cheap thermostat that can read the temperature from a remote wireless sensor? The configuration of the house makes pulling wire a PITA but I'll need to control the furnace based on the downstairs temperature. If I have to run wire, that's fine, but I'd rather avoid it.
I could try to balance the forced air system with the dampers so that the basement is ~70 and the upstairs is a bit on the cold side. When the insert is running I could block off all the registers upstairs to keep things at least a little bit balanced. I don't want to do anything to damage the furnace by restricting flow, etc, though,
Anyone have an inexpensive way to deal with this problem? Other than putting an insert into the basement fireplace for the tenant to use?
