Have any of you ever put a stove in your basement? Does it work well? Or does the basement absorb the majority of the heat instead of it rising? Ive got lots of thoughts just want some input from guys and gals that have done it already. Thank you in advance!
My thoughts , if the basement is open floor joists to the level above it will be effective , if the basement ceiling is closed in it will not be that effective !
I have a huge wood furnace in my basement. It works great. Radiant heat keeps that area and the floor above it warm. Heat rises right! Draft on my chimney is strong also.
We have our stove in the basement, our walls are insulated so the poured cement walls don't eat up the heat. We can get pretty cold here with temps getting down to -20 to -30, when it gets that cold we'll use the furnace. We haven't cut any vents in the floor since having the stove installed, I'm sure that would help some. Our basement is the warmest part of the house in the winter but I don't like it too warm. If your basement walls aren't insulated, they'll eat up most of your heat. We usually burn 10 tp 12 face cord of hardwood per year and 50 bags of pellets in the pellet stove in the basement, if the stove was up here we would burn 6 - 8 face cord of hardwood per year. We also burn 4-6 face cord of shoulder season wood (pine or hemlock) per year since we have a bunch of wind damaged trees and dead pine. The basement isn't the best place for it but that was the only place we had room for it.
Part of this home is concrete block on all 4 walls of that area, we have to run that stove a lot harder than the stove in the lumber part of the house, like the concrete sucks up a lot of the heat. There are many here with basement installs and so many ideas on using fans to move the air. Particularly Backwoods Savage 's fan trick (works great for our unheated bedroom!!).
I have a woodstove in my basement and one in the upstairs. The basement is wall board all around including the ceiling. When running the basement stove I get very little heat upstairs from it and it will not stay warm as long after the stove is shut down as the upstairs part of the house. The upstairs is all spray foam on the exterior walls.
So the going wisdom here seems to be to keep wood stoves out of the basement unless it is well insulated....for efficiency. Concrete floors and walls tend to be a heat sink. If you're well insulated/aren't worried about that issue then other things arise. Is where you put it relatively easy to sweep? Is the path from the outside to the stove easy to keep clean? How long is the path from the outside pile to the stove? (We have all hard floors, stove is near to an exterior door with a wood pile right outside...sweeping is cake every time we bring wood in) Where is the chimney in the living floor? Or.install a new one to get the stove where you want it? Is there space close by for a small pile of wood? If you have it in the basement, how to get heat to the farther reaches/second floor? (Ours on the living floor keeps it toasty running 24/7, with a fan blowing cool air toward it as previously mentioned...the second floor stays warm inherently...no fans or air holes). Are you burning just to shave a little off the heating bill (in which case the basement might work) or run that stove full time? Do you and the wife and kiddos want to run to the basement to check and feed the stove? We wanted to and do cook meals on ours, keep hot water handy for dishes and drinking...and possibly bathing if needed. We enjoy looking at the fire, and if chilled or wet on a cold day, standing next to it is amazing: none of us wants to be in the basement to do that... Welcome to the FHC board. Sirchopsalot
Welcome to the forum Dylan. Some good answers above. My first though is always recalling so many who have tried basement installs and have had problems, not only in getting the heat upstairs but also with drafting problems which causes big problems starting new fires and even worse, getting lots of smoke in the house. There are so many factors involved sometimes it is difficult trying to determine how to solve the problems. Indeed the law of physics says that heat does rise. However getting enough heat to rise out of a basement is very difficult mostly because that heat has to go through a small outlet to get the heat upstairs. A fan st the top of the stairs blowing down, rather than up works to some extent but you most likely will never realize the full benefit of the heat. It is often at this point when people start thinking of registers to get heat upstairs better. But beware; that is against fire code because should a fire ever start, the freer air circulation will assist the fire and away goes the home. In addition, that could potentially cause you some heartache with insurance. All in all, although some make it work to some degree, I do not advise basement installs. It can sound good when planning but too many have spent too much and received too little return. Good luck.
Welcome to the forum. I've been heating our house from a standard woodstove install in our basement. This is the second house where I've done this. Do you have forced air heat? Both houses I've done had this and used the furnace blower to move the heat around the house. As Backwoods Savage mentioned above, basement installs can be problematic. Here is the experience I've had at our current home and it has worked out well for us. Good luck on your journey and happy hoarding. Relflecting the heat back into the house
Great first post/question. Be prepared to learn more than you ever thought there was to know about heating with wood. I wish I had found this club before I started wood burning for my main heat source. I have a stove in my basement, so here’s my experience. ( might get kinda long ) When we were looking at buying this house (built in 1975) it had a fire place in the basement and existing water damage that necessitated gutting the entire basement. I went to a stove shop to find out what I needed to check out before using the fireplace. After they explained how inefficient a fireplace is, I was planning to have them install a fireplace insert. The dealer took forever to come out and look it over and give me a quote and then still didn’t do what they said they would, figuring this was an indication of the type of service I would get if needed, I opted for a regular wood stove from another place. While overhauling/ remodeling the basement I had to strip it down to the bare block walls and studs on the interior walls to spray for the mold. When going back together I glued 1” ridged pink foam boards to the block walls and the built regular stud walls along them and insulated them with rolled fiberglass then Sheetrock. Floors are ceramic tile for ease of cleaning and resisting future replacement in case of more water trouble. I built a raised hearth pad (12”) and had a dealer install a Hearthstone Manchester on it. They cut out the damper arrangement and a hole for the pipe through the heatalator fireplace box. Then installed a stainless flex pipe with a insulation blanket around it through the existing exterior brick chimney. After they were done I closed in the old fireplace opening and covered it with cultured stone. I have 2 vents with fans in the ceiling of the room with the stove blowing the cold air from the upper level floors into the basement room with the stove. And the stove has a blower kit attached to blow warm air out into the room. The ceiling is reused roofing tin and no insulation in the floor joists. Carpet floors in the upper level. You can see one of the fan fed cold air return vents directly above the stove. I keep the stove running 24/7 during the heating season. I rarely have to light a fire in a cold stove. Once in a while I will get a reverse draft on a cold start and I have learned to combat that by using a homemade fire starter (sawdust & wax in a paper egg carton) and some kindling, then using my shop vac with the hose attached to the exhaust side and forcing air into the fresh air inlet of the stove. All in all it works pretty well and we very rarely use the electric baseboard heat that came with the house. If we’ve been gone over the weekend in the winter it can be pretty cool when we get home (electric baseboard heat set around 50 or so to keep from freezing up) but I’ll go down and light the stove as soon as we get home and by the time we get up in the morning the whole house is comfortable again. My biggest gripe is having to pack the wood into the basement but I guess that’s just the nature of the beast in my situation to keep from having a $400 to $600 electric bill. here’s a picture of the set up. Normally during the burning season there is wood stacked on both sides of the stove in the bricked areas
Woodstove in the basement here. The soil acts as an insulator. The worst losses are the part of the concrete foundation that is above ground when it is super cold outside. Stove still heats up the floor above it. When it is not too cold, say above 25ºF the stove will heat the whole house. 25ºF and lower the bedrooms at the far end start getting fairly cold. Only a 2 cubic foot stove, so it is a bit under size for the size of the house or the 'task at hand'. One things that really helps with "cold basements" is to keep the soil around them as dry as possible with downspout extensions or with dry wells as far away as practical to recharge the roof water away from the house.
Our stove has always been in our uninsulated basement. Works fine. Just need to establish a convective path for cold air to come down and hot air to rise- that’s right I said it- hot air rises, not heat.... heat radiates 360°. Otherwise we wouldn’t receive heat from our wonderful sun.
Stove's in basement. As recommended by others insulate the concrete walls. We reduced our wood consumption from 3.5 cord/yr to 2.75 cord. Everything heats up much quicker when the walls aren't sucking up the btu's. The 2nd season I started gluing blue foam to the concrete. Now everything is framed and drywalled.
When i put my stove in, i quickly found out the basement (and basement block walls) were taking all the heat and very little was going up to the main level. I sectioned off about 1/3rd of the basement where the stove is with a furring strips and R-max insulation wall and insulated the 2 outside walls with the same Rmax. The new "stove room" now gets to 90+ degrees. This is also where my steps are to the main level. I leave the basement door open and now the main level gets to 70-72° I use a small floor fan (screwed to the ceiling/ floor joists above the stove) to circulate air around the stove room to the stairs and another large floor fan (also screwed to the joists) to push heat up the steps. I put receptacles in the ceiling for the fans and ran a switch leg up to the top of the steps to turn the fans on and off as needed. (Mostly i just leave the fans running when it's cold out, say, below 45°) In shoulder season i get enough heat upstairs that i don't run the fans and sometimes i just close the door to shut the heat off. Edit; i wasn't going for looks, as my basement/dungeon is pretty rough. This project was for emergency/backup heat. For when the SHTF... , but when i realized the oil furnace hadn't run in 10 days since i fired the stove up (Dec. 13th 2013) i quickly changed to trying to get cheap/free heat. I've saved around $16k in 8 years years. I feel I recouped my initial investment in the first year when oil hit $3.49 gallon.
Yes only one room in the basement has sheet rock. If there’s a problem with plumbing or electric, unscrew the necessary panels, make repairs and screw it back up.
My foray into wood heat was using a Wonderwood stove in the basement...it was a colossal failure...I soon moved on to using a whole house wood furnace...much more betterer!
My brother had a Wonderwood/Ashley stove. They were really common back when I was a kid. My father had one, grandfather, I even have one for my garage. The problem with them is they aren’t big enough to be basement heaters. For a stove to effectively heat the house from the basement without the aid of pipes or ducts to move the heat, the stove has to be pretty big. My old Thermocontrol holds a wheelbarrow worth of wood at a time. Only downside is the old smoke dragons use a lot of wood.
