Heating question

[Orrex]

We live in an older wood frame home (~85 years). The insulation's not terrible, and the first floor stays pretty warm even with the furnace on 66 or 68.

The basement is semi-finished, with a concrete floor and cinder block walls, and it can get pretty chilly down there. The front room is enclosed with a door, and this is where the water pipe enters the home, so we often run our electric space heater in there to prevent freezing. This is also sort of my "cave" and my workshop, so I don't mind using the heater in there.

Would it be worthwhile to run our kerosene heater in the basement to raise the ambient temperature? Would this help with the rest of the house?

It's not urgent--we can make do with the way we've been going anyway, and I don't mind wearing an extra sweatshirt in the cooler months. But several people have advised us to put the kerosene heater down there, and they've been positively amazed that we weren't doing this already.

Thoughts?

[Kaleva]

1. Make sure you install a carbon monoxide detector in that room.

And many of the better brands of space heaters have an oxygen depletion sensor on them that shuts them off if oxygen falls below a certain level.

[Orrex]

3. Good suggestion, definitely

But would it help with overall heating of the house?

[Kaleva]

6. Hard to say.

I don't know how much of that heat you'd lose thru the exterior walls of that room. I'd suggest insulating the walls of the basement with 2" blueboard. Either way, a kerosene heater may be cheaper to operate then an electric space heater.

[safeinOhio]

2. Here is something to try.

Wait for a real cold, very windy day. Get a stick of incense and walk around the house with it lit. Hold it near doors, windows and all outlets. If the smoke stops going straight up and goes sideways, you need to calk around that area. Where cold leaks in, heat leaks out.

[Orrex]

4. Windows are another issue

We have three leading offenders that we won't be able to replace until spring. They're almost as old as the house, single-pane with rickety wood framing. Could definitely use some crack-patching there in the meantime...

[Curmudgeoness]

5. For a quick solution to use now,

get that plastic sheeting that you use on windows to keep the warm air from getting out.

For an answer to your original question, I have a house similar to yours, with a basement that gets really cold in the winter. I have experimented with heating it and not heating it, and I have mixed feelings. The floor does stay warmer, and I assume that the warmer air is rising into the house and keeping the thermostat from going on so often. So that is a plus. But it also costs me to heat that area, and it tends to cost much more than it is saving me to heat the basement. For this reason, I chose not to bother with heating it. I will say that it is easy for me to experiment since I have a gas heater set up down there already, and all it takes is firing it up or not. But mostly it has been "not". I will say that last year, I did have it on because of the unusually cold and extended subzero winter and all the water pipes that I did not want to worry about.

I know that this is not a real answer, since I do not have definitive evidence one way or the other, but this is just my experience.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. The cost per million BTU's of various fuels

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/heatcalc.xls

At $4.42/gallon The cost for a useful 1M BTU's of heat from a vented kerosene heater is $41. This compares well with propane at $49 and poorly with baseboard heaters at $35.