basement, gas furnace/water heater question.. dont have any ventilation..need to have some fresh air

Hi

I have a question.. In my basement I have my gas furnace and hot water heater... there is one window there... I currently do not have any fresh air access... The gas company said I should have some fresh air coming in with louver or vent.. Question:

do I need to run tubing so it sits 12 inches from the floor? Someone said I should.

what is the simplest way to do this air louver?

wont the room get cold? Thanks

Reply to
KOS
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Ji, Furnace insaller should take care of that when it was installed. Is your basement air TIGHT when the window is closed? Do you have any problem running furnace and hot water tank now? Do you hve CO detector in the house?

Reply to
Tony Hwang

The gas guy you talked to is an idiot. If your home was not drafting or Co is present. and thats about impossible with a properly working heating system, then he could be possibly be justified in making that assesment . Read UP

Reply to
ransley

One way to figure out what you need for combustion air requirements is to look up the installation manual for the type of gas furnace you have. The amount of space you need depends on how many btu's the furnace has, whether the source of air is outside air or inside air from within the building, etc.

For example, you could look at this installation manual (or one from a heater unit that is similar to yours):

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How big is your basement? Often, if the heater and hot water are in a regular size "full basement", the room size is sufficient without needing outside air to be brought in.

Reply to
RogerT

Run a dryer hose from outside the house to the furnace area, floor, ceiling, or wall mount the hose. Put an always open but screened cover over the vent on the outside to keep critters out. As long as you have a carbon monoxide detector somewhere in the vicinity of the furnace, everything should be fine.

Reply to
hrhofmann

Millions of houses have been built like that, but times are a changing. New burners are made to use fresh air intakes for combustion. You can buy a vent made for that purpose and either run dryer vent or PVC pipe to the heater. The advantage is you are not taking the heated inside air and burning the fuel and then exhausting it up the chimney. Fresh air enter, combusts, and then is vented while inside air is recirculated.

Oh, use a flapper if it is not direct connected so the cold air does not come in unless sucked it.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

My unit is 15 years old... There was a problem with the vents...there was a flapper vent connected to the furnace, but the flapper got stuck... Furnace was not venting, was getting very very hot.. CO detector came on..

Reply to
KOS

On the intake? I was talking about the intake but they do have motorized flappers that open on the flue when the heat comes on. Yes it can cause a serious problem if it stops working.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

.

Im sure it was an Exhaust damper, a saftey should have not let it fire.

Reply to
ransley

Last furnace I had with the power damper would not let the furnace fire at all untill the damper was fully open. It was a Lennox IIRC, and about 34 years ago

Reply to
clare

...

Like the uk doesn't? haha, try that on someone that hasn't been there a few times.

Reply to
jamesgangnc

Ours is 2" PVC pipe, as per the furnace manual (when I think of dryer vent I think of 4" stuff, which might be overkill if the furnace doesn't need it)

Oh, our home depot has a Kidde smoke alarm + CO alarm package at $26 at the moment - not sure if it's a national offer. The CO alarm runs from AC with battery backup, which is nice (although it won't take a rechargeable battery and charge it)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

KOS wrote the following:

My oil burner and LP gas water heater is in the basement under the stairs in the center of the house. That area is closed in and has a louvered folding door for access. I do not have any fresh air access from the outside. It has been that way for 26 years. My office/workshop is in the basement and that is where I am at the moment. I spend hours down here and have never seen or heard the burner or heater gasping for air, nor have I ever felt any ill effects from a lack of oxygen. Any air it needs is sucked out of the house from various openings between the basement and the rest of the house up to the attic where the flue passes through to the roof. I smoke down here and I have a window mount double fan sucking air out of the basement. When that fan is operating, I can smell what my wife is cooking in the kitchen above by the aroma being sucked down, so any air the heaters need can take the same path. I do have a wired CO detector down here and it has never gone off. I don't know what the code says about outside air access, but it wasn't code when this house was built, so I'm grandfathered.

Reply to
willshak

Old buildings were quite leaky and combustion air was not a problem. Buildings have gotten tighter over the years, and for a new house here (MN) now they are very tight I would certainly want a combustion air intake (required by code anyway). Could be a problem with an older house if air is being exhausted in some way (large exhaust fan, 30" living space to attic exhaust fan, fireplace).

When the boiler was replaced here (in my leaky house) many years ago they added a vent. It was a screened outside opening with a 6" flexible duct. If the duct just goes down to the floor you can get cold air coming in. If you bend it in a U so it goes down and then goes up it forms a trap. I don't notice any cold air.

A CO detector is a real good idea in any case. The code here is near the bedrooms.

Reply to
bud--

Not a yank

Reply to
clare

My old 1950's era house had a gas furnace/water heater. When they drew cold air into the house mostly through the upstairs windows. Those windows weren't all that great. I put a fresh air vent into the furnace cold air plenum. This brought the outside air into the house directly into the furnace where it was heated before moving into the rest of the house to replace the air lost through combustion. What it did was to reduce the cold drafts coming in through the windows upstairs. I could have just brought the outside air into the furnace room but didn't like the idea of -40 deg air dumping directly on the basement floor.

I built my new house above code. It's almost twice as big as the old one. The new house is heated with an electric furnace and of course has an electric water heater. My highest monthly electric bill in the new house is still lower than my winter monthly gas bill was in the old place and I moved out of there four years ago. By the way I paid as I used not payment on a equalized monthly budget.

LdB

Reply to
LdB

You don't specify the basement layout. One room, closed. Door ? You also do not specify the furnace. Closed system or partially closed, fan in/out or draft.

There are many many many basements without fresh air vents to the outside. Its typically leakage loses that vent. There are usually vents, or should be, on a room in the basement via the door via the upstairs. Carbon monoxide detectors usually warn against putting them in the furnace room, but I would anyway as far from the furnace as possible.

How big is the room? Is it insulated ? How is it connected to the rest of the building ? Are the ducts sealed, and are they insulated well ?

Reply to
zek

Hmm, the last place I lived at in the UK had gas-fired CH; where do such heaters typically source their combustion air from, then? I'm reasonably sure that one took air from outside and then burped it back into the outside world, just like a typical US forced-air furnace does. It was, however, mounted on an external wall, so there wasn't a long pipe run within the house for the combusion air; typical US furnaces I've seen have been in a more central location within the home.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

A furnace with a 2" PVC vent works because it has a draft inducer to pull the air through the pipe and vent the exhaust back out. If the OP has a furnace that works with a traditional chimney, that size pipe isn't going to move enough air to amount to anything.

Reply to
trader4

Right.... so how's that any different to a US furnace which may have a pipe supplying combustion air from the outside world, or be mounted against an exterior wall and thus draw air directly into the furnace?

I'm just trying to understand: "We don't have furnaces that need to bring cold air into the house", because it seems to me that the combustion side of things is the same, so there's no logic in saying (just from that aspect) that one is any better than the other - no matter which side of the Pond you are, the system will draw cold air from outside, and may or may not do so via a pipe. I hate forced-air systems*, I really do, but purely on the "bit that gets hot" side of things I'm not sure that a CH boiler is really any different.

  • I can see the benefits if you're in a climate that also needs AC - but for everywhere else it seems a bulky and inefficient way of getting heat to where it's needed the most.

(In the early '80s I was in a house in the UK that had forced-air, but all the others I lived in over there were CH/rads. Current place in the US is a combination of forced-air and electric baseboard)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

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