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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People did not really use the whole house during the day. Mostly the kitchen.
One measure to improve the efficiency was to put stones into the fire in the evening and then move them near the beds when they went to sleep.
When I was a kid we used to live in a large former farmhouse that had an open fireplace in every regular room, including the bedrooms, and one at each end of the main “lounge” room. 9 open fireplaces in all, plus the fire under the old copper in the laundry room, which also provided hot water for bathing.
We used to go through a lot of wood and coal in the middle of winter, and usually wore multiple layers, even inside.
In cold climates people were basically inside the fireplace. There was a fire with rocks on top, but no chimney, smoke rose to the ceiling, which had vents up high where smoke eventually escaped.
Some places (I’ve seem this in Mongolia, Ireland, and Canada), build the house around the chimney to make the system more efficient. As in, they do this to utilize heat transfer from the brick to the air, and instead of having the brick chimney of the fireplace be on an outer wall of the house, it is in the middle. The brick (which looks thinner than modern brick I see in ornamental fireplaces) then heats the air inside the house more (low and slow, but in Mongolia in winter it still kept the house warm) on the first and second story (if there is one). It was great actually, I got to lay my wet clothes on the brick and they dried! In Mongolia there was a metal sheet with air entry vents they kinda leaned on the open face of the fireplace at night to slow the burning and yet keep the heat in the brick. Maybe not directly helpful, but similar concept: I manage my house (I live in rural Alaska) with a wood stove which is in the middle of my home- and while my first story stays very warm, my second story stays only decently warm with this system. However, the second story room with the wood stove chimney in it stays almost as warm as the first floor because of the heat the chimney provides. If the chimney were close to an external wall/on an external wall, I would loose a lot of this heat to the outside.
You have to remember fireplaces have changed design over the years. When they were used for heat they had chimneys with material that would absorb and radiate heat into the structure. Stone or brick. They’d burn wood or even coal in some for this purpose.
With gas fireplaces it is more ornamental. Minimize the cost of fuel, maximize the light, and exhaust through the nearest external wall. That’s part of why they are less effective for heat.
Average home size in the US in 1945 was 700 square feet. Before that it was smaller.
Most homes in that era were barely larger than one room, and fireplaces pretty good at heating one room. But fireplaces also quickly gave way to things like the Franklin stove. Those modifications to fireplaces made them twice as efficient. A 19th century iron stove could easily heat a whole house as it was more efficient yet. In the 80s I lived in a house that was almost exclusively heated by a cast iron wood burning stove and even on the coldest days a log could keep the house heated for about an hour (you’d load 8-12 in there and it’d be good for an evening).
And trees are pretty efficient at making more trees, so as long as you had a forest and didn’t overharvest it, you were good forever.
The inefficiency doesn’t much affect the temperature of the house, but all the effort behind keeping it hot for a whole winter. Having an inefficient heating method meant that a good part of fall was spent buying/gathering wood, drying it, cutting it, storing it. People lost days and days of work (or money to pay others to do it for them) because the inefficiency meant you burned three or four logs a day and had to have enough for the whole winter.
This opposed to being hooked up to a gas line or some sort of kerosene burners that needed refills once a year, because efficiency meant they didn’t burn as much material to keep the same temperature
In northern Europe there were lot of fireplaces with warming walls – the heated hot air didnt go straight to chimney but instead it was passed through warming wall made of bricks. Usually, the warming wall is 1.5m x 2m and keeps the house warm for most of the day.
I grew up in a house heated only by a coal fire with a back boiler to provide hit water.. Eventually. So we spent most of the winter sat gathered round the fire with thick curtains closed to keep the heat in the room.
Years later my dad fitted a multifuel burning stove in its place. The amount of heat and hot water that generated is insane compared to the old open fireplace
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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