Aesthetics be damned! I love it. I haven't thrown a piece of wood away for over 35 years. I feel I have a personal relationship with every piece of wood I own. Still attempting to honor the tree from whence it came. Agonize over every cut. At the very end the pieces become biochar. Everything is screwed together so it can be easily repurposed including the screws if possible. Haven't used a nail in I don't know how long. Keep up the good work and thanks for your videos.
There is security in knowing you have a winter's worth of food. Bravo! Bonus that it didn't cost much and it incorporates recycling/reuse and working with natural processes. I'll bet the potatoes don't care about esthetics. I love it!
Love this! I live in and old farm house built in 1899. My basement is a total waste right now, but you have given me a great idea here! I can make a root cellar in my basement(dungeon :))!
I love the way you keep it simple. The door to let my chickens out is just a cinder block blocking a hole. Its ugly but its kept predators out for 3 years lol
I completely love what you've done. It's fantastic. I'm thinking about sectioning off an area in my basement to become a root cellar & I wondered about using foam board. And I like the potato bins too. Thanks so much for sharing this.
I have almost no building skills... But I could make this! And I have everything and more except for just a couple of pieces of foam board. Thank you for this… I love your your potato bins, I'm Using your idea to make my own!
My wife recalls that as a child her family had a root storage space in a dirt floor basement. It comprised of several wooden bins on the floor filled with sand in which carrots, potatoes , turnips and the like were buried each fall.
I bought that metal shelving unit on sale for $20 last year, actually bought 4 for myself and to give to my mother. Not only did I get them for that price but got another $3 in cash back for a future purchase. The site has changed and is now mostly just links for other companies, but you get them for $30 right now and $2 back in cash. Great shelves at a pretty cheap price.
Love the fridge! One thing I noticed... The rock wool or glass wool in the ceiling? When exposed to airflow they release very fine particles that are not good for your lungs, mice can make things worse if they make their home in it, nasty stuff! You can easily avoid that by close the ceiling and put some duck tape over the gaps...
Big fan of your channel and approach. I'm in Hawaii, so we don't have cellars and the temperature never gets low enough to preserve anything. I watch all your videos even though only about 50% applies to my current situation. This might not be a profound point, but I think the idea of cost beyond monetary cost might be the most important concept for future survival. You often talk about stacking function and building things inexpensively, which is critical, but I think the more important idea behind it is what is the cost to the environment. By building your cellar with used materials you're saving money and your overall financial expenditure is inexpensive, but you're also saving the manufacturing process of those component if you were to buy it new. I'm typically willing to spend extra time and effort to repurpose something and I get a real thrill out of knowing that I didn't contribute to the manufacture of another thing. For a lot of us, the financial cost savings is much less relevant than the other hidden costs that didn't get expensed; the collateral damage. Thanks for your channel. You're genuinely a role model.
I appreciate your thoughts here for sure. For us, a lot of the time the financial consideration isn't the driver at all. Saving $50 here or $100 there on a big project is nice but isn't critical. The ethics of re-purposing materials, avoiding the new manufacture of limited resources as you say, and in some ways, most importantly, being able to say 'no' to new is what pushes us in those directions. I highlight cost and price in the videos more because I think it's an entry point for folks to come into the concept of DIY, reuse, scavenging, bartering, etc. I figure people motivated by ethics around consumption will get it and appreciate the approach through that lens. It's nice to have that assumption supported by your thoughtful comment here! There are so many materials swirling at the edges of capitalism, hoping someone can still find them useful and can put them back to work! Committing to that approach as a default has made it so Sasha and I have a comfortable financial savings, operate a profitable, although small, permaculture business and enjoy ample free time. It's so many win-wins! Thanks for being part of the community!
I bet you could figure something out with a space outside in the earth or other space... But yes, having a basement is really incredibly valuable for projects like this.
what kind of foam board is that? I know you weren't going for aesthetics, but it's nice to have solid color foam board that doesn't have a bunch of writing all over it which is most of what I saw on home depot's website. Awesome awesome video brother thank you.
Just catching up on videos. When I lived in Ohio we had one in the basement I loved it kept everything cool and fresh. Thanks for sharing God bless you and you always be safe out there 💞💕💞💕👍👍👍
Fantastic, thank you! I've learned to accept that although I'm a pretty miserable carpenter, I can get by, using whatever we happen to have laying about, and what I produce will be functional. Elegance is over-rated. :)
Check out the wood stove video I made a few years back: ua-cam.com/video/6uuhrdmfnqo/v-deo.html I talk about it in that video. Hopefully that is helpful.
This is basically just for winter storage. A dehumidifier I suppose would be an option but you ggenerally want higher humidity for most storage crops...
Is there any heat transfer from the block foundation to outside the root cellar in the surrounding area? Would you recommend insulating the inside as well? Awesome video and ideas!
I couldn't say since I never measured. That said, I haven't sensed it so I wouldn't recommend it as a necessary first step for success. I'm still super super happy with this design after a few years. Very simple to set up and has been incredibly resilient.
Tell him I said I'm sorry :) Oh, and that we have the root cellar down there AND lots of space for cider and bottles and cappers and the works. Hopefully that'll help him feel better!
We do not have a root cellar or basement here in Upstate South Carolina. Do you have a video with alternative methods to store nuts over the winter before planting them in one of your airpruned boxes in the spring? Thank you so much!
Since your doing update video I was wondering how well your venison leg is coming along that you hung in the basement some time ago. I remember it was kind of an experiment to see if it would work out. I hope it did.
VERY brief update is it worked for a bit and I enjoyed it for a few months, then the weather turned insanely wet for a while and the humidity went too high in the basement. A new type of grey mold formed on it that seemed sketchy so I let it go.
North East is generally the coolest part of a basement from what I understand. The least sun hitting that part of the house. I could certainly be wrong on this but it's what I remember from way back when.
I love your low tech solutions but let's face it most of the lovely preserved food that people enjoy nowadays wouldn't exist if high tech had been around sooner- thinking air dried ham, smoked anything, pickles, jams, anything fermented, cheese, I mean the list is endless. People think that using old techniques and old technology is backward, but if we combine the best of both, we surely will have a much better future. I mean why waste energy when the alternative solution is as good and much simpler
So excited that it seems useful to you as a concept! I would say that the root cellar is basically 'closed for the season' come summer. We try to clean it out thoroughly and leave the door open to breathe come mid/late May until early October when it comes back online again...
Do you dehydrate any food? I had a ton of extra blueberries last summer and dried some. They are really good and last forever. I intend to dry a lot of veggies this summer for winter soups.
Great question. Yes, we dehydrate, and that would be a good set of videos to share our process. Sasha dries cooking and medicinal herbs in the summer for winter tea and soup, and we dry a ton of shiitake mushrooms for winter use. Probably would be a good practice to plan to dry more.
@@edibleacres I would like to see your process. Im planning on making a passive solar dehydrator. Its just such a low maintenance method of preservation. I got my wife a pressure canner for Christmas because she asked for one, so hopefully we will have a lot of nice canned soups and veggies too hah
10/10 going to do this or something similar in our new to us 75yo home. Question about the pawpaws: stored inside rather than heeled outdoors due to rodent fears or another reason? Thanks Sean keep rockin it
So excited that you might explore this concept. Pawpaws... Generally I like to simply heel them in outside, but this one set in the basement was from a container I had filled with super tiny baby pawpaws, and I wanted to see how they would work stored in the basement. I will plant them back out in a nursery bed with some space to get much larger this year. I want to see if it's worth the effort to store them this way (more likely than not I'll go back to 100% heeled in in rich, deeply mulched soil in mid-fall.)
@@edibleacres right on makes sense. Besides cold veg storage one of the primary reasons I want a cold cellar is to stratify seeds. Have probably a thousand nuts/fruits in my fridge, and a couple hundred buried in the yard. Would be preferable to have a space indoors where I can put quantities and better monitor them without occupying fridge space/getting a secondary fridge. I think this will be ideal.
@@davidsimpson2635 I think folks 1) in a cold climate, 2) with a basement, 3) with enough material wanting to keep cold that the thought of a 2nd or 3rd fridge 'might be necessary' should ABSOLUTELY explore what a root cellar could look like. You may end up deciding that building a root cellar lets you store more of your normal fridge contents down there can work and more seeds in the very stable fridge environment, or some mix. This is all aside from the idea that having a resilient, grid free way to preserve necessary food during the hardest season of the year isn't too bad an idea :)
It is a continual curve of function I think. Once the outside temps get below 50F or so it begins getting cooler. Ideal outside temps seem to be around 20-30F for the space to be really nicely cold, but you can always make adjustments to the intake, etc to get it where you need it.
We only recently moved into a home with a basement. I definitely want to build a root cellar. However, I have real reservations about bringing cold air inside the building envelope. We live in an area both further north and considerably colder than you. I'm concerned if it is not well designed and very well insulated it may consume more energy and cost more additional heating costs than it saves by avoiding refrigeration.
I can't tell you with any numbers/facts if that is a well informed concern or something not to worry about... BUT I can tell you that we're zone 5B, with pretty long, cold, wet, sunless winters with heavy winds, in a poorly insulated home heated with wood and we use about 2.5 cords a season... I would venture a guess our root cellar makes the basement a BIT colder overall but not by much. If it was built with a higher level of quality, with better sealed door, better insulation, minimal air gaps, and more insulation, with a controlled air intake (not a plastic bag!) and a way to handle the warmer/stale air it would be very appropriate and perform beautifully for you. if your air intakes could be truly shut off then it would be able to exist in your space and periodically have 0 impact on incoming cold air... I'd encourage you to explore it, let us know what you end up with!
@@edibleacres I definitely think it is going to be dependent both on climate and, to lesser extent, the details of your house and heating system. We'll definitely try something, but it may be a while as we have a lot of projects going currently. I may try something like they did at back to reality, if I can find a large chest freezer. Another option would be to use our unused well casing, but access would be inconvenient so it may be better secondary storage. We are quite a bit colder than you in zone 3b. Temperatures of -25F are normal. We are also 75% overcast in the winter and average over 8 ft of snow in the winter. Like most houses in our climate, our home is reasonably well sealed and insulated. With typical heating bills around $3000 per year, investments in improving the efficiency of your home generally make obvious sense. Interestingly, it seems that everyone thinks their winters are cold. In Texas people asked me how I could wear sandles when the weather was in the 50's. In Florida, every older lady was concerned because my 1 year old wasn't wearing a hat. In Wisconsin, the students are out sunbathing in bikinis at the same same temperatures. Having moved to Maine I am sending my children out to play because the weather is nice at temperatures that I would have said were quite cold just a year ago when I lived in Wisconsin. And when I look for information online about various aspects of dealing with the cold every post asking for suggestions for dealing with subzero (F) temperatures has at least one, and often many, responses from people saying "It gets really cold here to. Here is what I do when the temperature drops below freezing," (or even warmer). The range of human adaptation is huge. We adapt to what we are accustomed to and quickly adjust our expectations based on what is normal for where we live. And I'm sure there are still many people in the world who would envy me my warm climate (although examining maps and climate data it is interesting that population density seems to track temperature fairly closely when you get this far north.)
@@tnason04 I hear you fully on this! When it first hits freezing in the fall everyone has 10 layers on and rush to get back inside. First time it's really above freezing and the sun is out in the spring and people are out in shorts and a tee shirt! I know I've spent my fair share of January 40F days in a tee shirt soaking in the 'warmth'... Helps remind us how much of our experience is in our mind and we can choose how comfortable we are going to be if we think enough about it!
@@edibleacres I did that a few years ago. My mother in law happened to have a box set DVD. It was pretty cheese ball. FYI there's a 2016 remake of the show that you never want to see.
Aesthetics be damned! I love it. I haven't thrown a piece of wood away for over 35 years. I feel I have a personal relationship with every piece of wood I own. Still attempting to honor the tree from whence it came. Agonize over every cut. At the very end the pieces become biochar. Everything is screwed together so it can be easily repurposed including the screws if possible. Haven't used a nail in I don't know how long. Keep up the good work and thanks for your videos.
There is security in knowing you have a winter's worth of food. Bravo! Bonus that it didn't cost much and it incorporates recycling/reuse and working with natural processes. I'll bet the potatoes don't care about esthetics. I love it!
This is exactly what I wanted...no frills does the job!
Love this! I live in and old farm house built in 1899. My basement is a total waste right now, but you have given me a great idea here! I can make a root cellar in my basement(dungeon :))!
Go for it! You can store potatoes in your dungeon, er, um, basement!
I love the way you keep it simple. The door to let my chickens out is just a cinder block blocking a hole. Its ugly but its kept predators out for 3 years lol
Cinder Tech!
@@edibleacres HAHA
I completely love what you've done. It's fantastic. I'm thinking about sectioning off an area in my basement to become a root cellar & I wondered about using foam board. And I like the potato bins too. Thanks so much for sharing this.
So glad to share for sure.
I have almost no building skills... But I could make this! And I have everything and more except for just a couple of pieces of foam board. Thank you for this… I love your your potato bins, I'm Using your idea to make my own!
I have almost no building skills too and this got made... you got this!!!
My wife recalls that as a child her family had a root storage space in a dirt floor basement. It comprised of several wooden bins on the floor filled with sand in which carrots, potatoes , turnips and the like were buried each fall.
Sounds like a great, simple, straightforward way to store produce for the winter!
I bought that metal shelving unit on sale for $20 last year, actually bought 4 for myself and to give to my mother. Not only did I get them for that price but got another $3 in cash back for a future purchase. The site has changed and is now mostly just links for other companies, but you get them for $30 right now and $2 back in cash. Great shelves at a pretty cheap price.
Sounds like a really great deal!
Thank you I love learning now that I lost my husband I am on a fixed income this is great for me
Love the fridge! One thing I noticed... The rock wool or glass wool in the ceiling? When exposed to airflow they release very fine particles that are not good for your lungs, mice can make things worse if they make their home in it, nasty stuff! You can easily avoid that by close the ceiling and put some duck tape over the gaps...
Thanks, good reminder to tackle that.
Big fan of your channel and approach. I'm in Hawaii, so we don't have cellars and the temperature never gets low enough to preserve anything. I watch all your videos even though only about 50% applies to my current situation.
This might not be a profound point, but I think the idea of cost beyond monetary cost might be the most important concept for future survival. You often talk about stacking function and building things inexpensively, which is critical, but I think the more important idea behind it is what is the cost to the environment. By building your cellar with used materials you're saving money and your overall financial expenditure is inexpensive, but you're also saving the manufacturing process of those component if you were to buy it new.
I'm typically willing to spend extra time and effort to repurpose something and I get a real thrill out of knowing that I didn't contribute to the manufacture of another thing. For a lot of us, the financial cost savings is much less relevant than the other hidden costs that didn't get expensed; the collateral damage.
Thanks for your channel. You're genuinely a role model.
I appreciate your thoughts here for sure.
For us, a lot of the time the financial consideration isn't the driver at all. Saving $50 here or $100 there on a big project is nice but isn't critical. The ethics of re-purposing materials, avoiding the new manufacture of limited resources as you say, and in some ways, most importantly, being able to say 'no' to new is what pushes us in those directions.
I highlight cost and price in the videos more because I think it's an entry point for folks to come into the concept of DIY, reuse, scavenging, bartering, etc. I figure people motivated by ethics around consumption will get it and appreciate the approach through that lens. It's nice to have that assumption supported by your thoughtful comment here!
There are so many materials swirling at the edges of capitalism, hoping someone can still find them useful and can put them back to work! Committing to that approach as a default has made it so Sasha and I have a comfortable financial savings, operate a profitable, although small, permaculture business and enjoy ample free time. It's so many win-wins!
Thanks for being part of the community!
I love it!!
When my apples start getting wrinkly like that I turn them into vinegar.
Nice idea. Sasha's been making more cooked foods that incorporate them. They almost have more concentrated flavor when they get wrinkly!
@@edibleacres Yes! The sugars in them start to develop more, I think. I use them a lot in curry!
Well done! I think the term you're looking for to describe the non-weight-bearing walls is "curtain wall". Good for you!
Ah, cool... Thanks!
Love the pallet idea
It has been pretty good as a basic and free way to get things going. We may upgrade but for now we're pleased
I love how you make this so accessible! This is great.
How did I not see this video before. I obviously wasnt looking hard enough.
This is the low key/low cost idea Ichave been looking for
Glad you found it now!
really like that it's so simple and not costly.
Beautiful and well thought out. Practical.
Thank you!
I found your video. Thank you for being so generous!
Wonderful video, I so wish I had a basement :( . Potatoes and onions....what more do you need to eat, yum.
I bet you could figure something out with a space outside in the earth or other space... But yes, having a basement is really incredibly valuable for projects like this.
what kind of foam board is that? I know you weren't going for aesthetics, but it's nice to have solid color foam board that doesn't have a bunch of writing all over it which is most of what I saw on home depot's website. Awesome awesome video brother thank you.
It is much older stuff, paper backed. Nice simple look but not ideal around mold formation unfortunately. We may have to replace it this summer...
@@edibleacres hmm okay good to know. so what would you use instead?
I so wish I had a basement in my house, this being one very good reason for one. Bravo.
Wish I could give you 2 plus thumbs up. Love videos about storing food, root cellars, and green houses. Please keep sharing!!!!!
That's really good DIY 👍✊
Ingenious!
Just catching up on videos. When I lived in Ohio we had one in the basement I loved it kept everything cool and fresh. Thanks for sharing God bless you and you always be safe out there 💞💕💞💕👍👍👍
Very nice info in this . I will be suggesting this to the hubby. Thank you
I hope it's a great fit for your needs.
Wow great root cellar!
Love this! Curious how it functions during the Summer since there isn't any cold air coming in?
Same
This is awesome! Oh and budget friendly! Love it-thanks for sharing!!! Such inspiration
ingenuity = wealth
Fantastic, thank you! I've learned to accept that although I'm a pretty miserable carpenter, I can get by, using whatever we happen to have laying about, and what I produce will be functional. Elegance is over-rated. :)
I would be interested in seeing how you connected the pipe that draws air from the cellar to the wood stove, how and where that connects.
Check out the wood stove video I made a few years back:
ua-cam.com/video/6uuhrdmfnqo/v-deo.html
I talk about it in that video. Hopefully that is helpful.
Thank you 🙏
Of course, happy to share!
Great idea.. Will a dehumidifier work to keep out. Mold. And is this mostly for winter storage rather than summer
This is basically just for winter storage. A dehumidifier I suppose would be an option but you ggenerally want higher humidity for most storage crops...
Is there any heat transfer from the block foundation to outside the root cellar in the surrounding area? Would you recommend insulating the inside as well? Awesome video and ideas!
I couldn't say since I never measured. That said, I haven't sensed it so I wouldn't recommend it as a necessary first step for success. I'm still super super happy with this design after a few years. Very simple to set up and has been incredibly resilient.
@@edibleacres Thank you, Sean!
This is definitely something I'd like to try and incorporate into our basement!
Best of luck with it. It certainly isn't a big deal to try.
☺
Simple and effective, I like it.
Great ideas, love it!
Going to add this to our 'want to do' list! My husband is going to have to move his homebrew storage/wine racks. :-)
Tell him I said I'm sorry :)
Oh, and that we have the root cellar down there AND lots of space for cider and bottles and cappers and the works. Hopefully that'll help him feel better!
It helped. He agreed once he realized he can store his hot sauce and other ferments in there.
That's really great
That is an impressive amount of food. I really like the system. I am looking forward to seeing those hazelnuts grow when the time is right.
Me too! I'll plan to do some update videos on our air prune beds and nursery developments this spring.
We do not have a root cellar or basement here in Upstate South Carolina. Do you have a video with alternative methods to store nuts over the winter before planting them in one of your airpruned boxes in the spring? Thank you so much!
You could bury containers outside under soil and leaves, so long as you have rodent proof containers.
Very nice! 🙂
It's late Sept 2021, I see your sold out of all your products, will you have anything in spring or only in late summer?
We plan to have some nice inventory lined up for March 1st that people can order for spring shipping. THanks for your patience.
Since your doing update video I was wondering how well your venison leg is coming along that you hung in the basement some time ago. I remember it was kind of an experiment to see if it would work out. I hope it did.
VERY brief update is it worked for a bit and I enjoyed it for a few months, then the weather turned insanely wet for a while and the humidity went too high in the basement. A new type of grey mold formed on it that seemed sketchy so I let it go.
@@edibleacres Thats to bad.
Why is NE ideal? thank you for another informative video.
North East is generally the coolest part of a basement from what I understand. The least sun hitting that part of the house. I could certainly be wrong on this but it's what I remember from way back when.
What is the climate in the root cellar in the summer? I'm in Maine and hoping to do the same.
A little dank and not amazing :) Not a place to store things in the summer...
Looks great! I'd love to know more about what's in those jars. Something tasty, most like.
I would too! Sasha is going to be making more videos as time goes on so I bet we'll get to learn her magic tricks in making these wonders!
I love your low tech solutions but let's face it most of the lovely preserved food that people enjoy nowadays wouldn't exist if high tech had been around sooner- thinking air dried ham, smoked anything, pickles, jams, anything fermented, cheese, I mean the list is endless.
People think that using old techniques and old technology is backward, but if we combine the best of both, we surely will have a much better future. I mean why waste energy when the alternative solution is as good and much simpler
We built one in our basement, inspired by your root cellar. We get to it through our pantry.
Thank you, Sean.
How does it do in the summer?
So excited that it seems useful to you as a concept!
I would say that the root cellar is basically 'closed for the season' come summer. We try to clean it out thoroughly and leave the door open to breathe come mid/late May until early October when it comes back online again...
EdibleAcres that's what we figured. Thanks.
Do you dehydrate any food? I had a ton of extra blueberries last summer and dried some. They are really good and last forever. I intend to dry a lot of veggies this summer for winter soups.
Great question. Yes, we dehydrate, and that would be a good set of videos to share our process. Sasha dries cooking and medicinal herbs in the summer for winter tea and soup, and we dry a ton of shiitake mushrooms for winter use. Probably would be a good practice to plan to dry more.
@@edibleacres I would like to see your process. Im planning on making a passive solar dehydrator. Its just such a low maintenance method of preservation. I got my wife a pressure canner for Christmas because she asked for one, so hopefully we will have a lot of nice canned soups and veggies too hah
10/10 going to do this or something similar in our new to us 75yo home. Question about the pawpaws: stored inside rather than heeled outdoors due to rodent fears or another reason? Thanks Sean keep rockin it
So excited that you might explore this concept.
Pawpaws... Generally I like to simply heel them in outside, but this one set in the basement was from a container I had filled with super tiny baby pawpaws, and I wanted to see how they would work stored in the basement. I will plant them back out in a nursery bed with some space to get much larger this year. I want to see if it's worth the effort to store them this way (more likely than not I'll go back to 100% heeled in in rich, deeply mulched soil in mid-fall.)
@@edibleacres right on makes sense. Besides cold veg storage one of the primary reasons I want a cold cellar is to stratify seeds. Have probably a thousand nuts/fruits in my fridge, and a couple hundred buried in the yard. Would be preferable to have a space indoors where I can put quantities and better monitor them without occupying fridge space/getting a secondary fridge. I think this will be ideal.
@@davidsimpson2635 I think folks 1) in a cold climate, 2) with a basement, 3) with enough material wanting to keep cold that the thought of a 2nd or 3rd fridge 'might be necessary' should ABSOLUTELY explore what a root cellar could look like.
You may end up deciding that building a root cellar lets you store more of your normal fridge contents down there can work and more seeds in the very stable fridge environment, or some mix.
This is all aside from the idea that having a resilient, grid free way to preserve necessary food during the hardest season of the year isn't too bad an idea :)
@@edibleacres ya mon! Would be cool (heh heh) to make use of this cold. Enough of it to go around in Nova Scotia I tell ya what
In what position construction of your house you do?
How do you keep fruit flies from multiplying if a couple slips in?
We let spiders live in our basement, we don't clean every last web, they take care of them
How do you keep mice out?
At 11:30 we see a mouse trap. He also mentioned their cat is allowed to hunt occasionally.
Ty!
How cold does it have to be outside for this to work?
It is a continual curve of function I think. Once the outside temps get below 50F or so it begins getting cooler. Ideal outside temps seem to be around 20-30F for the space to be really nicely cold, but you can always make adjustments to the intake, etc to get it where you need it.
Wrap the apples individually in newspaper to help them keep longer. :)
We only recently moved into a home with a basement. I definitely want to build a root cellar. However, I have real reservations about bringing cold air inside the building envelope. We live in an area both further north and considerably colder than you. I'm concerned if it is not well designed and very well insulated it may consume more energy and cost more additional heating costs than it saves by avoiding refrigeration.
I can't tell you with any numbers/facts if that is a well informed concern or something not to worry about... BUT I can tell you that we're zone 5B, with pretty long, cold, wet, sunless winters with heavy winds, in a poorly insulated home heated with wood and we use about 2.5 cords a season...
I would venture a guess our root cellar makes the basement a BIT colder overall but not by much. If it was built with a higher level of quality, with better sealed door, better insulation, minimal air gaps, and more insulation, with a controlled air intake (not a plastic bag!) and a way to handle the warmer/stale air it would be very appropriate and perform beautifully for you. if your air intakes could be truly shut off then it would be able to exist in your space and periodically have 0 impact on incoming cold air...
I'd encourage you to explore it, let us know what you end up with!
@@edibleacres I definitely think it is going to be dependent both on climate and, to lesser extent, the details of your house and heating system. We'll definitely try something, but it may be a while as we have a lot of projects going currently. I may try something like they did at back to reality, if I can find a large chest freezer. Another option would be to use our unused well casing, but access would be inconvenient so it may be better secondary storage.
We are quite a bit colder than you in zone 3b. Temperatures of -25F are normal. We are also 75% overcast in the winter and average over 8 ft of snow in the winter.
Like most houses in our climate, our home is reasonably well sealed and insulated. With typical heating bills around $3000 per year, investments in improving the efficiency of your home generally make obvious sense.
Interestingly, it seems that everyone thinks their winters are cold. In Texas people asked me how I could wear sandles when the weather was in the 50's. In Florida, every older lady was concerned because my 1 year old wasn't wearing a hat. In Wisconsin, the students are out sunbathing in bikinis at the same same temperatures. Having moved to Maine I am sending my children out to play because the weather is nice at temperatures that I would have said were quite cold just a year ago when I lived in Wisconsin. And when I look for information online about various aspects of dealing with the cold every post asking for suggestions for dealing with subzero (F) temperatures has at least one, and often many, responses from people saying "It gets really cold here to. Here is what I do when the temperature drops below freezing," (or even warmer). The range of human adaptation is huge. We adapt to what we are accustomed to and quickly adjust our expectations based on what is normal for where we live. And I'm sure there are still many people in the world who would envy me my warm climate (although examining maps and climate data it is interesting that population density seems to track temperature fairly closely when you get this far north.)
@@tnason04 I hear you fully on this! When it first hits freezing in the fall everyone has 10 layers on and rush to get back inside. First time it's really above freezing and the sun is out in the spring and people are out in shorts and a tee shirt! I know I've spent my fair share of January 40F days in a tee shirt soaking in the 'warmth'... Helps remind us how much of our experience is in our mind and we can choose how comfortable we are going to be if we think enough about it!
$20 for a shovel?
Did you watch any MacGyver when you were a kid?
I did a bit. As an adult I like the idea of revisiting it... Seems doofy but fun!
@@edibleacres I did that a few years ago. My mother in law happened to have a box set DVD. It was pretty cheese ball. FYI there's a 2016 remake of the show that you never want to see.
Nice inexpensive design.
Great content like and subscribe u deserve more subs thanks very much
How do you keep mice out?