There is now heat in the basement. Last night, I ran a duct and tapped the main supply to provide heat for future bedroom in the basement. It just happens to provide heat to the area where I'll be working. :) I'll post pics once I get them off the Queen's camera.
The Queen just told me this morning that she thinks it's silly to heat the basement when it's not insulated. In principal, I agree with her, however, the heat happen to be one of those necessary items that needs to be run sooner rather than later, along with plumbing which I'll need to alter really soon. Besides, As long as we'll need to be working down there, it has to have some heat and I can always turn off the vents and direct the airflow up through the house instead. It won't cost us any more than using an electric heater down there while I'm working, so I don't really see a problem.
Am I alone in this train of thought or is the bridge out ahead?
I got a surprise when I was working on the heat down there last night and I'll post about it later. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of it. :)
This post was brought to you by the letters H, E, A, T, and the number 9.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
We Have HEAT!!!
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1 more ramblings:
I'm no engineer, but I've heard others say that keeping the lower part of the house warm actually helped keep the upper part of the house warm. In fact, I have a friend who has a two-story house with a large open great room open to the balcony overhead. He took a 6-inch PVC pipe and ran it vertically, starting about six inches below the ceiling in the top of the great room, straight down, through a hole in the first floor, to the crawl space under his house. In the winter, he closes the vents outside to the crawl space, and runs a little tiny fan inside the PVC pipe to pull warm air down from the top of his greatroom ceiling, down the pipe, into the crawl space. He redirected his furnace return air ducts to pull air from the crawl space. He swears that having the warm ceiling air heat the (uninsulated) crawl space, and then pulling the crawl-space air back into the furnace to be reheated, has save him half of his heating bill. He says by heating the crawl space, even though it is uninsulated, the lower floor of his house stays much warmer and saves him a ton of money on heating bills. You'd think in the summertime he'd run the PVC fan backwards, blowing cool crawl-space air up to the greatroom ceiling to cool the house as it settled back down, but no... he runs the fan the same way summer and winter. But in the summer, he doesn't circulate the ceiling air to the whole crawlspace, he adds a pipe to the bottom of the PVC pipe inside the crawlspace directing the air from the pipe directly into his A/C unit air intake. He claims that pulling the A/C air return directly from the ceiling sucks off the hot air and brings it directly into the A/C for cooling. Again, I'm no engineer, but he swears he's cut his electric bill in half since installing that PVC pipe. And since his crawl space is completely uninsulated, I'd say you might be onto something. Plus, it's a lot more comfortable working in climate controlled construction areas. I would be surprised if you noticed a huge difference in your utility bills. I might be mistaken, but it's worth a shot.
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