<p>Our family is fairly large (14x24). Has cathedral ceilings and is on top of the unheated garage. With all these factors working against it, the room is always cold - much colder than the rest of the house. We have forced hot air with two zones - the first floor is all one zone and the second floor is a different zone.</p>
<p>We’d like to make this room more comfortable to be in since we use it a lot. What would be the best way to add additional heat for this room? Add a third zone? Add electric heat or a pellet stove? Convert the traditional brick fireplace to an electric fireplace? We don’t want to use a space heater and don’t want to spend an outrageous amount on this either.</p>
<p>Is your garage finished?
Weatherproofing the garage may help, but ours is detached so I dont know how much difference that would make.
Do you have insulated blinds & windows?</p>
<p>The sounds like my sons bedroom. It’s the bonus room over the garage.it’s always at least 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the upstairs except he doesn’t have a fireplace.
How about putting a gas insert in the fireplace? The turn it on when you are in the room.</p>
<p>Clients of mine got a gas stove in their family room (next to not over a garage) and it really blasted out the heat. That said, if you want the room to feel warmer, the first thing I’d do is work on getting the floor warmer. Take out any insulation in the floor and fill it up with foam, then seal everything and put on a layer of Type X gym board on the garage ceiling. Do a blower test and see if there are any other leaks in the room. Check the specs on that cathedral ceiling, it may be inadequately insulated as well. Sometimes a lot of hot air ends up on the ceiling so it may help to get a ceiling fan that sends the air down.</p>
<p>You could invest in insulated garage doors too. Radient floor heating would be the most effective, but for various reasons might be too expensive or impractical.</p>
<p>We have some areas of our house that need extra heat. We’ve used different kinds of space heaters over the years. I like electric, oil-filled radiators the best. They are quiet, safe, don’t dry out the air with a blower, have wheels so you can move them around and put away during the summer. (I know you said you don’t like space heaters, but these radiators are a quick, inexpensive solution.) We have 2 gas fireplaces that we never use. I really don’t like them–don’t think the gas heaters are safe. One of our fireplaces has an electric “wood stove” heater in it.
It is sort of noisy, but provides a little “atmosphere.”</p>
<p>The obvious thing is to insulate the garage ceiling and, very importantly, see what air is flowing into and under the floor upstairs. You can heat it all you want but all the heat will rise up if cold is coming in from below. </p>
<p>A garage is not only cold but odds are pretty good very little thought or care was given to air penetration. Stopping cold air from flowing along the bottom of your floor will help immensely and should be fairly cheap. You can even get a company to come out and foam along the edges if you don’t want to do it yourself. But, really getting into where the air is coming in might require sticking something into the area above the garage ceiling so you can find the holes. You can then think about insulating the top of that entire space.</p>
<p>Remember, air exchange, meaning cold infiltration, makes a space feel much colder. </p>
<p>As for heat, I suggest a gas insert if that’s practical. The fans are continuously adjustable. They require a gas line and the installer drops a liner down the chimney that brings in cold air and vents combustion gases. Air from inside the room doesn’t go into the fire at all. The things are self-enclosed so air from the room is drawn through vents around the firebox, heated and then blown back into the room. I don’t know how the electrical equivalents work.</p>
<p>I would add insulation between the garage and the family room and then put in in floor heating–but that might be more costly then you want to deal with. Ceiling fans large enough to move air around for the space–might need more than one, and a gas fireplace will help. Those won’t be all that costly unless you don’t have a gas line near your fireplace. Running a gas fireplace doesn’t use much gas and is pretty efficient. We run ours in the fall and spring when the mornings are cool but the afternoons are warm and we don’t want the furnace on. It will heat the entire downstairs in about 30 minutes.</p>
<p>We have that EXACT layout in our house; we installed electric heat and only turn it on when we use it/need it…in our house, that is rarely because the room does get some heat from the rest of the house and it faces West (it is actually too hot certain times of the year)…if we’ve turned it on 10 times in 20 years, I would be surprised…</p>
<p>Insulating the floor/ ceiling will make it seem warmer, as will thick area rugs.
We use oil filled heaters, and sweaters &/ or afghans in the winter to stay warm, although our family room faces south & gets lots of light & heat.</p>
<p>We bought a freestanding gas stove for our large high ceilinged family room.
You can get propane or natural gas models. We absolutely love it. It puts out a lot of heat and makes the room feel cozier.</p>
<p>We had a room like that and did buy a free standing heater, it was one of those long low ones that sort of looks like an old fashioned electric baseboard heater. It was programmable and worked wonderfully, but we did not have the fireplace option.</p>
<p>Agree with the freestanding little gas stove. Ours looks like a little cast iron wood stove but you can see the logs. It puts out a lot of heat as needed.</p>
<p>Convert existing brick fireplace to a gas fireplace. Easy gas line installation in garage ceiling. We put in a ventless gas fireplace–made a huge difference in our FR, also located over the garage.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the suggestions thus far. A gas fireplace sounds good - H is a bit reluctant to do this. He thinks the house with the traditional brick fireplace has a certain appeal to it and the house might not be as attractive to a buyer with a gas fireplace. Just his feelings - any truth to that?</p>
<p>A free standing gas stove sounds good too - except for the fact that it would take up additional space…I like the idea of using the existing fireplace and actually making it useful!</p>
<p>You can get more expensive/fancier looking ones but I like this one because it is narrow and sits maybe 10 inches out from the wall where it’s conected to the gas line…
It has a thermostat so you can set the temp. you like and it will go off and on by itself. We love this little stove. When it’s on, our heat pump often doesn’t even come on because the stove puts out some much heat.</p>
<p>We had gas logs in our house that we sold last year (the house w/ the stove is our new house). It was a selling feature.
We burned wood for years but finally gave in and bought gas ventless gas logs and loved them. So nice to just lean over and flip a switch anytime you wanted to “knock the chill off”. We sold our house in 24 days. The buyers liked the gas logs.</p>
<p>You can shop for yourself for a gas insert with a few measurements: depth of the firebox, width - note any taper - and, very importantly, where the smoke shelf is and how far back the lintel inside goes, meaning where the opening to the flue is. You can get traditional looking ones, like Vermont Castings, or modern ones. The fires inside look more realistic with each generation. They only add the depth of the front of the insert to the fireplace. That means an inch or two. </p>
<p>But I’d have someone check insulation first.</p>