help! our house is freezing.... where to start?

Lets start there, as this is the most fundamental and the most important.

Is the furnace coming on? Not all thermostats work right, or are located correctly. A thermostat in room with a woodstove will never get cold enough to turn on the furnace. So the house freezes while the thermostat is kept comfy by the woodstove. Relocate the thermostat or woodstove in this case. Similarly a thermostat that is out of calibration will not turn on at the right temperature. It's pretty easy to check and adjust.

When the furnace comes on, does it stay on? If it doesn't stay on, the house isn't going to get warm. A very common cause of this is having warm air flowing over the thermostat. This causes the thermostat to kick the furnace off. So examine the air flow over your thermostat, paying particular attention to how the warm air from the vent flows in that room.

Is the quantity of air coming out the vents adequate? It's a balancing act. If you've got one room blasting air, the other rooms are going to get virtually no air. You've got to dampen down rooms with too much air in order to build up the rooms with no air, creating a balanced heat through the house.

Is the air coming out the vents warm? I've seen houses with dandy furnaces have the ducts run outside under the slab, and then back up into the house. Remarkable how that cold ducting sucks all the heat out. Similarly I've seen furnaces "improved" with measure that prevent the combustion heat from ever warming up the air. So if you've got plenty of air, but none of it is warm, chase down why and fix it.

Then, and only then, should you go looking into insulating the house and such. Insulation is a good thing. Saves money and such. But it's not all the same, and blowing in insulation after the fact creates its own entertaining problems. I went with foam myself in my century plus farmhouse.

Yes rip from the inside out...down to studs and exterior wallboard and then insulate and refinish interior walls....BTDT not fun!(plus we had to bleach out wood-- mouse pee/poop 30 yeears of it)Best done in Summer for good ventilation and sleeping in a tent in the yard until job is done!

We had trailer windows and replaced with vinyl for $99 each and now we dont feel the wind! or have ice build up on inside which melts, rots wood, makes mold....

That said it all. That's the way it's always been in the country. Farm homes were designed for shelter, and not for comfort. Some had extra bedrooms so there would be winter and summer rooms. Whatever rooms weren't being used, the doors were kept shut. Only the kitchen and living room were priority for heating. Bedrooms only had to be warmed in the evening when it was time to go to bed. Heating them the rest of the day was a waste of wood. Grew up that way and didn't forget it when I left the farms. Two rooms in my house haven't been heated in almost 20 years since we don't need to be spending much time in them.

So, best advice is to do the natural thing and get cozy for the duration. Live only in that part of the house that you need to for comfort. Dress for the cold, not the beach. Learn long underwear and what it meant to be "sewed in" for the winter. And be thankful that mornings like 30 Jan, 1951 are something that we see here only once in a lifetime. Rest of the house may have been freezing but there was that wood stove to run to and drive the cold out of our bodies.

Martin

We went through this a few years back. I kept telling DH the house was freezing, he would go to the thermostat and it would read 68. He would tell me I was nuts, and to put another sweater on. I kept showing him my Galileo thermometer, how it was reading below 64, but he didn't believe it. Finally we figured out he had put a computer in front of the thermostat, and the hot air blowing out the back was throwing off the temp gauge. He moved it and the temp read 58!


I ripped out walls in our stairwell due to a swarm of honey bees living in the walls. They (the walls, not the bees) were plaster and lathe, and I stripped it down to studs from the inside and insulated with the pink stuff before having DH put up sheet rock. We also replaced the two windows in that hallway, and it has made a huge difference.

Cathy,
This is a subject I know more about than sheep. I use to work for Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp.

So much to say and not enough time to say it so start HERE:
http://www.focusonenergy.com/index.jsp

You need a professional "blower door" test to determine where air is leaking in to the house.

The stove pipe should be doublewall construction so it should NOT be hot to the touch on the second floor (or the first floor).

Some other quick thoughts:
Window replacement is a VERY poor payback. Do NOT do this first. Until you can make a list and put priorities in place I would try this "fix" that my wife and I did back in college. Buy 4x8 sheets of foam insulation, one inch thick or so with the aluminum facing on one side. Cut to cover your double hung windows on the inside. Seal shut over the window with duck tape. Leave it on the windows year-round upstairs. Only the bathroom windows need to be opened for ventilation.

Professional insulators (that have been trained) can blow insulation into existing walls without creating empty spaces. They just need to be trained for the type of siding on the home and the construction of the walls (YES some older homes are harder to fill the cavity). Madison has (had) well trained insulators for the low-income programs in the early 1990's.

More later.

Yes, from the inside. it was disgustingly dirty work! What insulation we found was grey fuzzy stuff. As for the windows...well, let's say they were older than dirty. Yes, we got vinyl for the same reason that Mpillow says.

Your house sounds like the house my FIL grew up in. No insulation anywhere. Newspaper on the walls to block some of the air infiltration. He said that waking up to a winter morning you might find snow on the feather tick that blew in through the cracks around the window. To use the wash bowl pitcher, one had to break the ice. There was no lounging around after supper in the living room, listening to the radio. It was too cold.

Many good suggestions noted. I haven't seen much emphasis on the one we used every winter when I was growing up. That was using clear polyethylene over the windows on the outside, not the inside. We took the clear plastic, took a narrow strip of carboard (poster board) the length of the window on each side and the width at the top and bottom and then folded enough of the plastic around the strips to be able to staple or tack the strips to the window frame. The strips keep the plastic from ripping in a wind and eventually tearing away from the window. Put plastic on the outside of your screen doors, like the windows, if you have them. Weather strip with a cheap weather strip around the doors, if you have air infiltration. Use a lit candle to check for air infiltration around windows and doors (Be sure to move the curtains or window shades!) Caulk around the windows (doors) if there are any gaps between the window (door) frames and the outside wall of the house.

Other than air infiltration, most heat is lost out of a house, like a human, through the top (attic). Insulate the attic if you have one. If you only have the space between the upstairs ceiling and the roof (between the rafters), that brings on more talk.

I am certain that you have a triple insulated stove pipe coming up through your upstairs floor, through the room space and out the ceiling. If you feel very little heat, then it's probably doing its job, but the pipe may need the attention of a chimney sweep. It may be partially blocked by creosote, which, if you get a really hot fire going in the stove, you have the chance of a potential disaster, a howling blow torch shooting flame, smoke and burning creosote out of the pipe, the burning creosote falling on the roof. Yes, I am trying to frighen you, if you're not sure of the condition of the pipe. Get it checked. A question, are you burning seasoned or green wood? Green or partially seasoned wood doesn't put out the heat (btu's) of seasoned wood and is an invitation to creosote buildup, especially using an airtight stove. And finally, what type of wood are you burning? Resinous woods, pine, fir, etc. are really bad about creosote, too. The hardwoods, oak, hickory, ash, are best.

Get on a ladder close to the ceiling on your first floor and see just how much heat is near the ceiling. Take a strip of TP and hold one end at the ceiling of your first floor and the opening of your stairwell to see just how much air is going up the stairs.

The room lay-out and the location of your wood stove can determine just how much of the house the stove can heat. Opening the upstairs to heat from the first floor through vents cut in the ceiling/2nd floor can really make a difference, as has been posted. Before doing that though, see how much heat is residing at the ceiling level, you may have so much air infiltration that cutting the ceiling/ 2nd afloor won't help that much.

Hope my ramblings help.

SolarGary's website has some great tips.
Also there was a thread about checking your wood stove with a laser pointer. It might help to see if the stove is tight.

Small space heaters might help the electric ceramic ones are great

cathleenc, I used to live in NE Iowa, and it was cold there too! It's true, farmhouses were never heated that well in the past by today's standards. You just have to start where you are, and get warmer from there. Here in So. LA, it was at freezing this past weekend, and it was 2 degrees above freezing in most of my house, except the bedroom, that I heat! It isn't worth my heating the rest of the house with no insulation. I use all the plastic, blankets, and bubble wrap I can, as Suzie M mentioned above. In Iowa, winter cold called for more extreme measures! Good luck with this, but you can appreciably improve the situation with a couple rolls of plastic, for starters! ldc

AAAAAAAACK! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

DO NOT TEAR DOWN THE WALLS TO PUT IN INSULATION! DO NOT REPLACE OLD WINDOWS!

You guys grate the souls of old house lovers everywhere.

Preserve American history (and your money) by doing these simpler (not simple, simpler) things.

1. Don't tear down walls to put in insulation. There are two much better ways of handling this problem. The first is to replace the siding of your house with insulated siding. This, of course, depends on the condition of the existing siding. If you have crappy, dented siding, this is how you'll want to go. If you have nice and/or historical siding (wood) that you'd like to preserve, you can pop off a single piece of siding all the way around your house at the top and bottom, drill a whole between each stud and blow in insulation. Then replace the popped off pieces. Both of these would be cheaper than gutting your house and loosing all that plaster.

2. You don't have to replace your windows. As someone else (Bob?) said, they have a very long payback period. There have been studies done that show that old windows are nearly as good as new windows WHEN PAIRED WITH STORM WINDOWS. Put storm windows on the remaining old windows in your house.

My house was built in 1825 and has its original windows with storm windows. It also came with insulated aluminum siding (I totally lucked out.) My house is easy to heat despite its large size and stays cool in the summer too. I don't turn on the air until 3pm in August. I don't freak out about sealing every draft either. Air quality is horrible in new houses because they're sealed up so tightly. My house breathes and is still very, very comfortable.

FOR THIS YEAR until you can get to those other things:

I recommend dressing in layers and using the bedrooms only for sleeping. For keeping your living areas as warm as possible use thermal curtains or window quilts (but hang them properly or they'll do no good- inside your window casing), you can also hang quilts on the walls, they're pretty and insulating. On particularly cold days you can heat a huge stockpot of water to boiling and then let it sit on the stove. It will radiate heat for hours.

Please don't destroy your beautiful, old house. You CAN be warm and still preserve it.

RedTartan

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Replacing old windows with new windows helps keep the house warm, even if the new windows are crummy. This is because you loose so much heat around the windows, not through them. The wood around the windows will have receded, allowing cold air to enter the house. When new windows are installed, this air exchange is stopped, so even new single panes help. Check the area around the windows. If the previous owners put in cheap double pane windows, they aren't much better than single pane, but if they didn't fit the windows tight, there will be a real problem. You can move a lit candle around a window (no curtains) to get an idea of the fit of the windows is a problem.

Check the furnace fan. It's possible that it's not on, though if you just had somebody look at the furnace, I would expect that it's working, and the filters are clean. Put a small electric fan at one of the upstairs ducts. If you get a warmer room, you'll know it's not the furnace itself. As written above, there could be a blockage in a duct.

do you have "return air" ducts/vents upstairs? make sure they are not covered or blocked because in order for warm air to exit a duct into the room, the some air must leave the room. If they are covered it is like trying to force air into a bottle, it can only let in so much if some is not being released.

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IOWA

Well, we live in an old farm house too, and it is far from air tight. The first thing we did was replace the windows. If they are truly old windows - single pane, built with wood, I'm guessing you can feel air blowing in. When we replaced our windows with double pane glass, we were amazed at the difference - rooms were alot warmer (no cold air coming in) plus it was so much quieter. Before you could hear cars and trucks passing by, and afterwards - not!

We have an old pretty much antique furnace in the basement. When we moved in 17 years ago, every year there was always something wrong with it resulting in hundreds of dollars in repair bills. The last time the repairman was here, he suggested replacing it because the parts were becoming obsolete. Instead, we got ventless gas heaters. We have one in the basement, 2 on the main floor, and one upstairs. We hardly ever use the furnace anymore. (Ventless heaters are nice as they use no electricity - so if your electric goes off, you still have heat.) And all the heat stays in the house. The only drawback is they do leave a "film" on the windows and mirrows, and they release moisture (but in non air tight homes) it's not a problem.

My quick heating suggestion would be to heat the basement - either put a wood burning stove down there, or a ventless gas stove. Heating the basement also heats the above floor resulting in your first story being warmer. (Much like in floor radiant heat works - the floor is warmer, so you don't feel so cold.)

And plan on replacing the windows when you have time/money.

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Michael W. Smith in North-West Pennsylvania

"Everything happens for a reason."

Someone should have told the previous owners of this house that. We redid all of their efforts to make it into a modern looking house. Oy.

Being newbies to old home remodeling, we started tearing out a lath/plaster outside wall so that new wiring, plugs, switches, and a porch light could be installed along with one new vinyl window. Inside the wall was this dark gray blown-in insulation of unknown material. The plaster had an obnoxious smell, and I believe the insulation triggered coughing and a dry throat. After getting this opened up I wondered if we had done the wrong thing. Was this asbestos which could cause lung problems in the future? Well, it's done now. The new pink insulation is up now reducing drafts. We also have the insulated aluminum siding over the old wooden siding. One bonus to tearing down the wall was that we found pieces of a Nov. 21, 1903 Practical Farmer magazine.

When we moved into this farmhouse 15 years ago, the only heat came from a small ventless gas heater and the fireplace. It was a frigid November day with the heat being off for weeks. We were being rushed out of our previous house by the new owners and didn't heat the house soon enough. We froze that first night. It took a couple days to warm the walls and us. Now the inside temperature is comfortable in winter and summer.

Nappy

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~~~~The best time to do something is between yesterday and tomorrow~~~~

move the air with some fans... all the hot air is sitting on the ceiling.

Don't go upstairs.

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Alice
* * *
"No great thing is created suddenly." ~Epictitus

Exactly my experience! My house (built in 1850) is just about to loose the very last bit of it's historical character when I gut the downstairs. We've learned how to do things better, no need to hold onto the past.

Pete

I couldn't agree any more, with the exception of the insulated siding comment.

You will be stunned to find out how much better your house will be once you put storm windows on them.

Clove

Rose has the best advice! Right now, all of the remodeling advice isn't going to do a bit of good since winter is not the time to begin that. Until spring arrives, all you can do is work around what you have. With most of the windows having been replaced within the past decade, they are probably not the main source of heat loss. With two-story farmhouses, most of the loss is straight up. In fact, they were designed that way so that a stove on the first floor would heat the upstairs through floor vents.

As stated before, shut off those parts of the house that you really don't need. Condense your living area and spend the rest of the winter being comfortable. Come next May, THEN you start working on permanent changes.

Martin