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”.
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I think the other comments explained it adequately, but I wanted to add that ‘inefficient’ doesn’t mean ‘ineffective’. A fireplace in an insulated house may lose a lot of heat up the chimney, but it’s still producing a lot of heat for the house and the house can still be warm. It just uses a lot more energy to maintain that temperature than it would if you weren’t letting so much heat out through a hole in the house.
In the same way that a less efficient car can go the same speed as a more efficient one, but it’ll consume more fuel to maintain that speed.
That all being said, a lot of houses heated with fireplaces were also poorly insulated so they’d be losing significant heat through more than just the chimney. And that brings us back around to sweaters and blankets and sitting by the fire and radiant heat and all the other things that have been mentioned in the comments already.
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