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
Yeah, to be warmest you have to sit in view of the fire and burn tons of wood. It’s not as inefficient as it sounds because you are almost constantly heating something up above the fire, be it cooking, water for hot drinks or cleaning, ect.
For a time when growing up, we used a wood burning stove as our primary heat for a 2-story 4-bedroom house. The stove was in the living room. The living room and kitchen were very warm. Upstairs in the bedroom, if you brought a glass of water when you went to bed, there would be ice in the morning.
Electric blankets and heated waterbeds kept us warm while sleeping, and then the day was less cold. Still most of our time at home was spent in the living room.
Coal. Gives off a lot more heat than wood. And if you were really lucky a fire in every room even your bedroom.
In the southwest, a lot of the older homes were adobe (the mud bricks). Adobe is a great insulator and also can radiate heat when it’s warm enough.
A friend in high school lived in an adobe home – they’d burn wood for a few hours and then let the fire die a couple of hours before bed. The house was still warm those two hours and depending on the night, at least tolerable when you got up.
A lot of older houses out here were designed around the airflow – because they were built long before Air Conditioning.
Enough homes were still headed by fire that there were “no burn nights” due to air quality issues”.
By simply putting up with colder temperatures than we are used to. You may not enjoy living in a chilly house, wearing as many clothes as you can, but people adapt and live with it.
They’re inefficient, not ineffective. They work, you just need to put in more energy (firewood, therefore cost) than would be optimal in a modern context.
If you look into most primitive technologies what becomes apparent after a while is that everything involved burning huge amounts of wood.
That kinda worked when the global population was merely 10’s of millions, although we did deforest enormous swaths of the planet, there used to be a lot lot more forest, Europe used to be 80% forest.
When the sheer number of trees needed for the burning started to become an issue we moved onto coal.
You would not believe how much coal we burn, 8 billion tons a year is not a number you can easily associate with. If you stacked it all on Manhattan it’d be hundreds of feet thick. Something like 25 floors of coal across all of Manhattan. PER YEAR.
And so now we have problems with too much burnt coal and wood in the air.
I spent the first 17 years of my life with wood heat. It wasn’t as if we were always cold, and we often had heat when others didn’t due to power failure.
Just as we have a way for fuel to be distributed for cars these days, there would have been systems in place for people to keep their fireplaces fuelled, old houses would have had coal cellars and the inhabitants would have had regular deliveries of coal and wood in order to keep their houses heated.
Additionally there would have been a fireplace in every room, so they only needed to heat the rooms they were in, instead of the whole house, plus people would have worn a lot more clothing back then, along with thick blankets to keep warm.
OP – lots of places and cultures had far more efficient systems. In europe it was surprisingly bad.
For example, see finish masonry stoves, russian stoves. Those things burn well and keep the heat.
Korean warmed floors.
And so on…
Latest Answers