I understand that with a traditional fireplace, most of the heat is lost through the chimney and you have to be very close to it to feel much heat. A wood stove or insert performs much better. However, I’m curious how people stayed warm enough in a house. It would seem that everywhere besides being near the fireplace would be freezing. I guess fireplaces were mostly meant to locally heat people near the fireplace, and not so much that the fireplace is a central heat source. That would explain why people often had a fireplace in every room. Just light the fireplace that you will be near for most of the time, etc. rather than heat the whole house. Just curious since you often hear “warm by the fireplace”.
In: Technology
There is no general answer as people did a lot of different things depending on the resources and technologies they had. You can still keep a house warm with just a fireplace, you just need a big fireplace and feed it lots of wood. And then of course you could heat water and drink this water for warmth, or heat stones in the fire that you could then keep close to you for warmth. Smaller houses need less effort to heat up so it was quite common to have a small living space, a lot of ancient houses also have animals in the same living space to help keep the heat up.
And not everyone had a chimney for their fireplace. This actually made the fireplace more efficient as it would not draft as much and the hot smoke would linger in the room heating it up. In general though houses was colder before and would have a lot of cold draft. Even today you can feel the difference between a 50 year old house and a 10 year old house, it is not the age of the house alone but the way it was built. You might see light though the cracks in the walls of a 100 year old house that have not been renovated.
So essentially people would live in a tiny smoke filled drafty cold room shared with smelly animals with hot soup and rocks for warmth and still use a lot more firewood then we use today.
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