Seriously. It's not like it's heating the outside air to blow in the rest of the house. It's just combustion air.
Insulate that room and seal it a bit better if you like. It's still a lot better than pulling air through all the other gaps in the house and running old sir through everything to get combustion air.
All, I really appreciate your insight on this, I learn so much on these boards every day.
True.
But also true, every single one of my ducts is sitting in 10 degree temperature. So all the air in the ducts ends up in the house. And all the ducts are losing a ton of heat in that ice cold air are they not?
This has got to be a new code requirement in the name of safety, but is it at the cost of efficiency? And it sure makes that bedroom in the basement cold.
And maybe I am wrong on which is more efficient, but I have a hard time believing what is essentially putting your furnace outside your house makes anything more efficient. Yes a furnace with no venting to the outside will draw cold air from outside, but only when running. This 'passive vent' as I am calling it is open all the time, dumping cold air into my house 24/7.
I reiterate my previous points, millions of homes have an 80% furnace in the basement with no hole cut in the side of the house. Surely if something as easy as cutting a small hole in the house increased efficiency it would have been done in the past right?
Really what I want to know is this simply done for code purposes, or is there an actual legitimate reason for it?
A quick google search shows that 500 a year die from CO poisoning. However the vast majority of these happen from portable propane type heaters in enclosed spaces. In my situation obviously the furnace vents the CO correctly, the issue is the negative air pressure on the gas hot water tank.