Sometimes we wonder why the basement is the coldest place in the house or how to make it so. And if there is no basement in a private cottage? What else can serve as a special multifunctional room designed for storing winter spins, household utensils, sports equipment, and communications? What is the difference between a cellar and a basement? The advantages and disadvantages of each are briefly described in this article.
Cellar or cellar?
Answering the question, it is important to understand the goal setting, the purpose of a particular room. The basement is an underground non-residential part of the building. Often it is adapted for a workshop, utility room, garage and other useful free-plan area. It is characterized by durability, height to the full height of a person, the absence of natural sunlight, the constancy of average daily and average annual temperature regimes. When arranging it to a depth of 2 meters and below, the average annual temperature fork fluctuates between +5 - + 10ºС both in the heat and in severe frosts, even when no one lives in the house and it is not heated. That's why inbasement is the coldest place. Usually it settles down under the kitchen, but it can run along the perimeter of the entire residential building.
The cellar serves exclusively as a storage place for blanks. This is a kind of roomy refrigerator, equipped with shelves and partitions. It can be equipped at the house, in the same basement, or stand apart in a summer cottage, more often on dry slopes, hills to minimize contact with groundwater. It is compact compared to its “brother”, you can only look into some designs to get a can of blanks from the shelf. Its size will depend on the needs of the owner and the estimated volume of blanks. Financially less costly.
Why is the basement the coldest place in the house?
The average physics student will be able to answer this question straight away: cold air is heavy, dense, it sinks down. This is the so-called natural convection. And the heat generated from the heating of the roof by the sun's rays does not reach the lowest room. But this is far from the only possible answer.
Quality characteristics of the basement
The basement requires significant investments in construction and decoration (about a quarter of the estimated cost of the entire house). Why? The basement is the coldest place in the house. For this statement to be true, a high-quality construction of the structure is required, which requires determining the structure of the soil, the implementation of land (for preparing a volumetric pit),drainage (for removal of superficial and ground waters), concrete works. It is also necessary to make a clay castle with a dense rammer, a waterproofing sand and gravel pad, process walls, floors (for example, with bituminous emulsions). After all, the main enemies for such a room are water, dampness, mustiness, stuffy air. Hence, the main parameters that can extend the life of the premises are important: resistance of walls to earth pressure, destructive effects, high waterproofing and ventilation properties.
Thermal insulation is the basis of the foundations for the basement
Also why is the basement the coldest place in the house? The answer to the question is good thermal insulation, which protects floors, doors, hatches, walls around the perimeter of the room from freezing.
The use of ultra-modern insulating materials (polystyrene foam, fibrous wadding insulation), usually on the outside of the building, will avoid the formation of condensate, fungus and mold, and will also save 15-20% of thermal energy that will not leave the building. at home, spent on heating an unheated room.
