Thanks for taking the time to respond. I have set-back thermostats already. The problem is I don't want it cold when we get home just a moderate - like 63-65 temp. I can have the set-back thermostat take it all the way down to 50 degrees but then the furnace would just have to work that much harder to get the house heated up by the time we got home. The basement is such a small(er) area compared with the first floor - and it shares the space with the oil furnace so there is also residua heat given off by that - that it just seemed to make sense to share some of that heat with the first floor and turn off the furnace upstairs altogether. The LP heater in the basement wouldn't work very hard because it doesn't take much to heat the downstairs up and I would imagine that even if I put in floor registers to share the heat it would probably still not take a lot of LP to keep it at 68 degree down there constantly during the day.

I have also seen floor registers that have fans built in to pull air up - not sure how well these work though. I guess maybe I should just pay someone to keep my woodstove going all day ! Anyway, any more advice appreciated and thank you for the response !