Furnace room door - OK to leave open?
 

On Sunday, February 22, 2004 at 2:06:18 PM UTC-5, TURTLE wrote:
"Kimberly Young" wrote in message ...
Greetings folks:

We just recently moved into our first home, and are thus experiencing the
initial shock at the cost of heating the place in this Canadian winter!

Our furnace room is a relatively warm place in the basement of course. This
may be a stupid question, but is it acceptable to leave the furnace room
door open to provide a bit of warmth to the rest of the basement? While the
door isn't fireproof or anything, I'm concerned that leaving the door open
could cause the furnace to draw air from the rest of the house, sucking in
more cold air from outside.

Am I out to lunch here? Advice please!

Thanks,

KD

This is Turtle.

I can't see how your system is set up but it would provide a little heat to the basement but would cost you way more fuel cost for a
little heat that you would get from it. It just would be too costly to try to get a little heat from it [ pull outside air in ] .
Now on the other hand your not suppose to burn liviable area air for the burner air supply to a furnace and it becomes a safety
issue.

Even though this is an old thread, that info is wrong. National code
in the USA allows drawing air from the living space or basement for
a furnace. Today, the vast majority are being installed as high
efficiency ones that do pull air from outside instead, but if you read
the install instructions, they typically allow air to be instead
pulled from inside if desired. Some areas may have different local
rules, as always.