Quote:
Originally Posted by hayden55
Redpoint you have a lot of issues with that kind of setup in a house. That smell downstairs is mold from lack of humdity control. Concrete is vapor permeable so it lets in moisture. Stay between 30-60% year round. So your top house gets solar gain on the walls and roof year round, your lower house doesn't and even gets the opposite effect. The concrete leaches out heat, a lot in the winter, and not much in the summer, but no solar heat gain since you're below ground. The big heat loss is really in the 3 feet below ground area and below that i think ground temp is more or less 55 degrees year round. Also, houses breathe upwards so heat will always go up.
Look into manual J calculations and see how far off you are right now. Also look into air sealing and blower door test even updating or improving your insulation strategies, and look into a paint on vapor barrier for the basement
I know the new equipment is so good im looking to swap my oversized furnace, 10 seer ac system out to a new air source heat pump one day and then when my whole house is electric and efficient and balanced as i can get it i will swap to solar as i will have the most balanced load with the smallest solar system
|
I have a cheapo hygrometer/thermometer in the basement logging conditions. I blocked the upstairs return for 1 week and found no difference in temperature or humidity. Since then I've opened the upstairs return since it made no difference (except to increase temperature measured from the registers).
There's no insulation in the boundary separating the ceiling of the basement and the floor of upstairs. I wonder if that could help keep heat downstairs AND attenuate a bit of noise?
Highest priority to me is to install a door since I'd like downstairs to be capable of being a separate living space. Sound travels upstairs as if it's just an adjacent room.
It seems that the musty smell is almost gone during the winter. Humidity has averaged 54%, peaking at 63% during the NYE party and falling back to normal after 2 days.
I have no summer data since I just started recording 10 days ago.
The previous owners hastily painted the concrete portion of the walls, I suspect in an attempt to control humidity. No idea what product they used, but my plan was to more thoroughly seal, though that requires the previous application was a sealer, or removal of that paint first.
I'd like to apply an epoxy to the concrete floors. I might as well do my garage floor at the same time.
My guess is that spring through fall humidity exceeds 60% most of the time, leading to the musty smell. It's somewhat faint, so I don't think it's extremely humid. Perhaps small mitigation strategies will shift it just enough. I want to avoid running a power hungry dehumidifier.
I see references to blowers drawing as little as 60 watts when there's no call for heating or cooling. Perhaps just keeping the air mixing between floors is enough to close the temperature and humidity gap to within acceptable limits.
My hunch is at minimum I have a blower replacement in my future, but since I don't see mention of blower only replacements, more likely is a furnace replacement. Once I'm at that point, replacing the inefficient AC with a heat pump becomes a consideration.