The house is approx. 900 sq. feet, there's one baseboard in each room and two in the largest room (11x15, the kitchen)... they really don't even come close to keeping us warm, but they were supposed to be just back-up for when the stove goes out or we aren't home for a few days. I have no problem with the house being 60 degrees though, I just put a sweater onxpc said:
It's still the baseboards... because the stove is in the kitchen and the layout of the house is such that some rooms don't get any heat from the stove, so most of them still come on...FarmerChick said:
Or you could just camp out in the kitchen in the winter. :/hwillm1977 said:It's still the baseboards... because the stove is in the kitchen and the layout of the house is such that some rooms don't get any heat from the stove, so most of them still come on...FarmerChick said:
We had an energy assesment done and they tell you how big the drafts in your house are... for example, my parents mini-home came back as having a hole the size of a basketball in the wall... our house is so drafty it's the equivalent of taking one living room wall off
This summer the project will be replacing all windows, doors, and insulating the remaining walls and the attic... if we can come up with the money
We have window fans (two fans side by side that usually slip into a window in the summer) in the tops of the doors to the rooms for moving the hot air around on the bottom floor...
We had a trailer that was paid off, but it was in the middle of a city, in a trailer park with a 6 foot yard... and because of student loans I can't get a mortgage, so we started driving around the country every weekend looking for fixer-upper houses we could either buy cash or the owners were willing to rent to own... our budget was about $25K if they would rent to own because we didn't want to pay for a house for any longer than 3-4 years.FarmerChick said:
3 cord is way too little of an amount for where your are and for the condition the house you describe, my guess would be in the 7 cord range. My winters are 3 months at worst and typically 4C day and -8C night with a completely remodeled house of new windows and insulation from top to bottom and can burn 3 cords. Your wood should be at least 2 years dried or it may not heat well. My wood stove easily heats 3 bedrooms to 16C and the living room and kitchen to 22C, I use one ceiling fan and nothing else. Something isn't burning right.hwillm1977 said:yep... it's hard... keeping up with the power bills costs so much that it's hard to have money left over for supplies to fix the house... and so goes the vicious cycle.
we really were completely unprepared for the move to this house, but are slowly turning it into a better place... just a lot slower than we had planned on. This is our third winter here, and I thought the house would be completely finished by now... it's not even close
We have been buying wood, it's takes about 3 cord/winter... but we own enough land that we have been cutting trees and will have dried wood for next winter so that will help a lot next year too.
It was built in 1883, all original windows and door (we replaced one door with an energy star steel door)... about 900 square feet... originally it was built as a rooming house for sawmill workers in the area. Its a story and a half, with an annex off one side for the kitchen. There is no foundation under the kitchen, and it is sinking so will be torn off and rebuilt after weatherproofing the main house. The woodstove is in the far end of the kitchen, so that room would be around 40C degrees when the rest of the house is comfortable... even with the wood burning most of the baseboards stay on a lot of the time.xpc said:
