Do I need to heat my unfinished cellar?

Those hatches will present a problem in that the steel will transfer cold and they are drafty.

Anyone contemplating this would be wise to close off the hatch area from the rest of the basement.

justinromeu26

in General Discussion 1 year and 11 months ago

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angela7606 | 1 year and 11 months ago

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Would love input. I’m gutting a townhouse. Was planning on ditching steam heat boiler system and going with heat pump mini splits. Then in passing the other day, a plumber said I need to heat the cellar to avoid pipes bursting in winter. Do y’all heat your unfinished basements?

Can anyone chime in with experience please.

JohnHancock | 1 year and 11 months ago

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For most ppl the boiler is down there, creating enough residual heat to keep the temperature from dropping too low.

justinromeu26 | 1 year and 11 months ago

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the short answer is that you should be ok if the cellar is below grade and sealed up. the long answer is something else. i’ll get to that later.

cate | 1 year and 11 months ago

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Our completely below ground cellar is always temperate all year round, even with the windows open. No need for heat in our cellar.

justinromeu26 | 1 year and 11 months ago

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cate, he is talking about removing his boiler.

keep in mind, the earth is a bit warmer down low, say below 48″ in the winter here in the NYC area. if your cellar is sealed and below ground you should be ok. it might get cold but if you are running heat above, it won’t get that cold. i doubt it will ever get below 40F. maybe not below 50F on an attached house with the heat on up above.

I had an uncle with an older detached house on the east end of LI and there was no heat in the cellar and his was not fully below grade. maybe 18″ was above grade. i do not recall it ever getting terribly cold down there. maybe 45F. his house was unattached. his pipes were all exposed and i know this: when he retired and went south for the winter, he did turn it all off and drain the pipes. so yes, if the house had no heat at all on, his thinking was they would have froze. keep in mind he had some exposure all the way around.

if you see it getting below 40 there are things you can do to protect pipes such as insulation or electric heat tape. I doubt these would be necessary.

steve
brownstonehomeinspection.com

northslopian | 1 year and 11 months ago

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I completely disagree with the above comments. We had a pipe burst during the winter/cold snap a few years ago. We were away. It was an expensive nightmare. We now have heated insulation around the main. The main is in the front of the house and housed with all the meters in its own room with a door that was closed. We now keep the door opened during winter.

justinromeu26 | 1 year and 11 months ago

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Northslopian, there had to be some other factor. did you turn your heat way down or off or do you have drafts in the cellar? or is it an exposed basement? are there hatches? windows? Did the power go out when you were away? or the water main was up above 48″ (the frost line)? i have worked in buildings for years (professionally; i am one of the people who would have gotten in trouble if the pipes broke) and in unheated cellars and they just do not get that cold on their own in nyc. exposed basements are another story. (my own house is another story).

Now this: in 1990 i took a job on the ocean front in Carolina Beach NC and we had buildings on stilts with exposed pipes (wrapped in fiberglass insulation). one night the temp dropped to 15F. I went home that night thinking we’d have broken pipes in the morning and it never happen. we ended up putting heat tape on those pipes and recovered them with insulation.

Next door to me, the neighbors were losing their house. As the power got cut off and they fled a few paces ahead of the bank, they opened all o f the windows in the house – including the basement windows – with no heat on (they wanted to break the pipes to screw the bank). i sat and waited for the pipes to break and water to come into my house. it took surprisingly long, like 3 days of 20 degree weather with the windows wide open before the pipes broke. That cellar has about 24″ exposed in the front and full exposure in the back in addition to the windows they had left open.

Op, if you have a cellar or basement with exposed walls (above ground) with windows, you can have an issue. but a completely underground and sealed cellar, no. not even in the middle of winter will it get that cold with a warm floor above it.

There is a lot written about this on line.

northslopian | 1 year and 11 months ago

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The basement has hatches, but all brownstones in Brooklyn have hatches for the basement, it is standard and probably DOB policy. It was exceptionally cold. We never turn temperatures down on the boiler or thermostat. But if you are away and the pipes freeze, there is definitely a chance that they will burst.