No heat in northern home all winter.
With the high cost of keeping heat in our Illinois home all winter while we are gone I am considering turning off all heat to our house. I already turn the water off and blow out the lines and winter...
Forum Discussion
soren wrote:John&Joey wrote:
We turn off everything to our place, but then again we built it so that could be done. We've been doing it now for over 20 years with no damage to walls, floors, paint, misc...
Many cabins and cottages do exactly what you are saying. Also many foreclosed homes the banks will do that also. The banks do not pay to heat homes that they are trying to get rid of.
What you need to be aware of is frost busting the foundation. Heat is meant to escape threw the basement to help keep the frost away from the foundation. This busting of basement walls will only happen in areas with extreme cold temps (minus 20 and more.)
I was a home builder in a wet, wooded region where crawl spaces are common, and winter temps. might go to zero on rare occasion, but typically lows in the teens are more common. I have seen unheated vacation homes with cracked and bulging foundations, and even frost that worked it way deep under the structure and heaved column pads upward a few inches. Now, you are spot on with regard to damages likely in extreme cold, but don't forget frost needs three things, low temps, moisture and conditions that retain moisture. I can assure you that in our wet clay soils we have three of three. When my new homeowners tell me, "We are planning on shutting the heat off in the winters" I'm pretty blunt.
I tell them to expect drywall damage, to be aware that structural damage due to frost heaving is a possibility, and that I don't warranty poor decisions.
In my area of Michigan, I don't know of anyone that heats the foundations. We get quite a bit of sub zero F temps. Almost no season homes are heated in the winter.
According to your post,you heat foundations where you live. How do you do that? We only heat the house and that would have nothing to do with the "frost busting the foundations", obviously you would have to get heat down there somehow. We insulate to keep the heat above the crawl space. You must do it different. This sounds real fishy to me.
