My house is 108 years old and all masonry. It has a below grade basement which gets cold in the winter. I have hot water heat and pipes running across the entire basement ceiling. 80% of the basement has a concrete floor and the other 20% is dirt covered with plastic. The basement is also vented. My first floor bedroom gets cold in the winter because the basement is sucking the heat out of the floor. Between the bedroom floor joist I have the heating pipes and electrical wires so fiberglass insulation is out. The house does not have a sill plate. It is masonry block followed by brick from the foundation to the roof.

Would it be worth the effort to seal all of the exterior basement vents and cracks in the winter so that the heating pipes could warm the basement to eliminate the cold bedroom problem or is there a better approach? I assume that I would need to open the vent in the summer months each year.

What would you do? I can post pictures if that would help anyone understand the problem.

Thanks in advance for the your help.

James Eric

It sounds like you would be trying to basically heat a root cellar through ambient heat; not very efficient to say the least. Since the house has stood for >100 years, I would advise against sealing the vents, so that only leaves insulating and/or heating the floors.

I'm not at all familiar with hot water heating, but don't know of any reason you can't insulate between the joists where appropriate; seal in the ceiling of the basement, leaving proper access panels; install a floor heating system in the bedroom, if that is the only room having issues.

Your two choices are to treat the basement as a cold zone or a warm one. If the below ground space is as uninsulated as it sounds, then you will expend a lot of money pumping energy into what is basically a heat sink that will stay 60-ish degrees year-round.

Build a wine cellar in the cold space, put a floor heat system in the bedroom, and insulate where you can.