We are building our house this summer and have decided on the following:

- SIPs for walls
- Engineered trusses
- Blown in Cellulose for attic/roof
- Full basement
- Location: Eastern Ontario, Canada
- One story craftsman style house 32'w X 58'L
- 3 bedrooms, two baths and central kitchen/livingroom/dining room area
- Primary heat will be a masonry heater and the wood will come from the 90 acres we live on
- Radiant heat in floors in bathrooms (electric)

I have two concerns currently that I would like suggestions to:

1) What backup heat would you recommend? I have played with the idea of radiant heat in the basement floor heated by solar panels but this isn't truly a good backup due where we are located. I know electric baseboard is simple but I do not like this type of heat. We are not sure how often we will not be in the house but it could be for a lengthy period of time, e.g. 2-3mths, as we RV and I work on the road currently.

2) I have looked at ICF and some other solutions for the full basement however nothing has sold me yet. So I was thinking of having rigid insulation attached on the outside of the foundation walls and will eventually finish the basement, but not in the near future (I got to build the house first!). Any other suggestions on how to try and make this a 'comfortable' basement? My concerns about ICF's is that I do not have the time to do this myself and am intimidated because concrete is tough work and I don't want anything to go wrong. I have built the forms and poured concrete for a slab previously but that is nothing compared to 8-9' foot walls.

We have decided against SIP's for the roof due to a recommendation from a SIP's provider. He suggested that if we blow in a lot of cellulose, it would be a cheaper solution. We did this on our last house and blew in 22" which worked great for our strawbale house.

Thanks for any suggestions.
Kyle

If you don't want to go with resistance electric, you could put in a small kerosene or natural gas furnace. My parents use a small kerosene heater in their office at work with a 55 gallon barrel in their warehouse. The vent is just a small pipe that goes out a side wall, and you don't have any of that kerosene smell you would typically think of. Only problem is most of them need electricity to run, so you might consider some kind of ups backup for the system. The small natural gas heaters with the pilot light don't have this issue.

The biggest advantage of putting foam board on the outside of your foundation is to protect your waterproofing during backfill. You can't put insulation under your footer, so you are always going to have a thermal bridge there if you are only using exterior insulation. This might be fine if your basement is going to be deep underground, but if it is a walkout style, I wouldn't recommend it. You could also frame some insulated walls just on the inside of your block walls, or just put some foam boards on the inside to get your wall up to a better R value.

Since you have 90 acres (lucky) why not look into radiant floors powered by outside wood burnig furnace. W/glycol closed loop if you do leave the area for a couple months there would be no freezing in the pipes. Complemented by icf would be best. As for the bridging issue if one was to insul. 4 ft min. (horizontal) past the footers it would take care of it, unless as aardvacus said you have a walkout.

Propane and a pilot light would be my choice for backup. If you live in the woods some distance off the road, you may not know that a tree took down your power line until you return two months later. You might also design your plumbing so it is easy to drain.
Builditsolar.com has a passel of wood heat links here -- http://builditsolar.com/Projects/BioFuel/biofuels.htm#Wood -- including plans for masonry heaters. You'd want to avoid an outdoor wood boiler. No matter how efficient the boiler is, you're going to get a big plume of particulates when it fires up after a period of idling. In fact, an oversized OWB can be an incredible wood hog. Even if its free, wood doesn't cut and haul itself.
Finally, if comfort is your aim, you'd want insulation on the inside of your basement walls and XPS foam on top of the floor. (Float an OSB t&g floor over the foam and add carpet.) Without something more substantial over the floor than carpet, it could take days for it to rewarm to tolerable levels, after an extended stretch with the thermostat at 50 degrees. Dunno how much you'd need an airconditioner, but if you do, full interior insulation would make it run more often by cutting off natural cooling from the soil. That isn't necessarily bad if comfort is your thing. The basement air would be drier and more like the conditioned air in the rest of the house.