root cellar / pantry

[Amishway Homesteaders]

Does anybody know of a link or have any help with building a 'cool room' for canning jars and stuff? we do have a hallway pantry that we use but in the summer it is a bit hot and in the winter when the furnace kicks in it get hot then too (sometimes above 80?). The basement is no good as we have an outside entrance and the furnace is in the room as well. Was thinking of doing something with blue foam core but can't find anything online? All they have are plans to build in the cellar with a room of shelves and we have a small one but it too get hot in winter?

 

Thanks for any help and please feel fee to move if I put it in the wrong forum spot?

[Dora]

There is an area in waltonfeed.com that gives a lot of info. I have another from Canada that I am trying to find as well. Good luck

Dora

[Dora]

Found it. Canadian Plan Systems #6321 plans for a small root cellar. Sorry do not know how to get a link to it into this message.

dora

[Buttercup]

Oh man do I want one of these! Does anyone have a link for detailed instructions on building a root cellar? WITH lots of pictures?

[Amishway Homesteaders]

Quote:

Found it. Canadian Plan Systems #6321 plans for a small root cellar. Sorry do not know how to get a link to it into this message.
dora

I did find it but that was for a seperate outbuilding. We are looking for one to use in the house - a room with some way of keeping the heat of the house out?. But thanks for helping.

[Amishway Homesteaders]

bump!

[Snowmom]

Just did a search and one brought me back here.

[Bookworm]

Will this help?

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Homesteadin...st/Root_Cellars

[Snowmom]

I also found more.

[Mother]

I don't have links to plans but can tell you that when I was young we had a root cellar dug into the dirt outside the cellar wall under a porch with a door into the basement. It worked beautifully according to my mother.

 

But my aunt had a very interesting room built into the basement. They had a big old coal furnace down there and it was always warm in the winter but that room was always cool. If memory serves me right, it was simply built from cement block walls in a corner and had insulation in the ceiling. It also had a small window that I remember my aunt opening at different times and closing at others. At the time I didn't understand but later realized that she was controling the temp and humidy. She stored both jars of home canned food and baskets of vegetables and fruit. I remember that she used buckets filled with damp sand for the carrots and other roots. It seems to me they got the plans through the government, perhaps the agricultural department as they were dairy farmers.

 

There are a lot of alternatives but sometimes you have to think outside the box. We are in the same situation with no place (no basement even) to store fresh crops. Last year we stored apples, potatoes and carrots in the pantry in styrofoam coolers on the dirt floor there under the shelves of canned goods. We found that with a bit of attention to detail like opening the lids a bit and making sure the humidity in them was correct (we used wet sand in the bottoms), they worked fairly well. The apples not as long because they really need a lot cooler temp and we ended up making lots of applesauce in December. The carrots kept until January, the potatoes a bit longer. We will be fine tuning that this winter by digging some sort of boxes into the dirt there. If we use wood instead of the coolers or plastic it would stay cool and a bit damp but we are concerned about rot. Perhaps it will work in the short term though.

 

Let us know if you come up with a good idea.

 

 

 

[Amishway Homesteaders]

OK we will try this one more time?

Thanks for all the great links but they are for root cellars in the house?

 

I was thinking maybe using blue foamcore as a heat block?

but need to find some way of venting the room too.

Thanks for all the help................

[Mother]

Now that is another story, isn't it. Sorry we misunderstood. We have no basement but the pantry part of the house has no floor in it yet (but a small cement foundation runs all around it) so we have a bit different situation but similar as our freezers (2) are in that area too and give off a lot of heat. It is between the main house and the furnace room where our wood furnace is so it stays warm all year there.

 

We have insulated all the sides AND the ceiling there. We have both a vent and a heat duct in the ceiling. We realize now that we probably won't need the heat one and it's closed off. We have hopes that once the freezers are removed we will not only have more room to store things but it will remain cooler. The problem we've found is that the vent opens into the hot attic and we dare not open it in the summer because of that but we are considering putting the vent pipe all the way through to the roof and using an inline reversable duct fan to either bring cool air in at night or exhaust hot air when needed. We are hoping to be able to rig this up so that we can run it either 110 or 12V but may have to have two separate fans. That way if we have no electricity we still have venting ability.

 

Because we store both canned goods and fresh crops in there we have to be extremely careful about the humidity. We don't want lids or cans to rust and we don't want our dry products to become damp. We have plans for either digging the crop storage area into the dirt there and keeping them cooler and damper that way or we will partition off the area some how. As it's only eight foot wide and about ten long it's going to be difficult. We are thinking some sort of doors that seal on the canned goods or some sort of insulated something for the produce???? That's still in the working stage yet. This is the first year it's been all closed in and this is also the first year we have the freezers in there. Hopefully the freezers are only there temporarily.

 

We did discuss the fact that if we eventualy had no or only limited 12v electricity, we would not be able to use the freezers and they might make the perfect environment for either the canned goods or the produce but they too would need some sort of ventilation with that. One is old and we've considered burying it outside the house to use as a root cellar when it dies.

 

The real problem I can see for you if this area is in the center of the house is that it will be warmed by both sides and above if you have a two story home. You would have to make sure it was super insulated. Is there a way to run a vent pipe through the ceiling all the way to the roof? Plus, if you could also run a vent to the basement and outside at ground level or even UNDERGROUND and then to the outside, you would have the ultimate cooling vent by bringing in cool air through that. Remember the principle though that hot air rises and cool air sinks so you might be losing your cool air off the floor without some sort of power. When we lived in our underground home (where by the way we had NONE of these problems, they are great) we had fresh air vents run from the floors, along the outside of the house and up to the surface. We had cool fresh air constantly coming from them even in the daytime as the soil cooled it as it came in. But the cool air was moving DOWN naturally. We are trying to figure out a way to do that in the pantry but as it's all ground level haven't got it yet.

 

Let me know if you figure something out, maybe it will help us.