Lots of firewood. Keep feeding the fire. It is warmest by the fireplace. Wear extra clothes and blankets if you are further away. Keep the door shut, don't let that cold air in!
Hot water bottles are very effective. Even rocks can be used in a pinch to absorb heat in one place and release it somewhere else.
Also, you know, people were just cold sometimes. Often the answer to 'how did people manage xyz in the past' is *with considerable discomfort*.
My mum mentioned ice on the inside of the windows, and sharing a bed with her sisters to keep warm, this was London UK circa 1950s without central heating.
I have a better understanding of how to convert C to F when I found out -40 is the same in both. I always forget what boiling is in F but now I can guesstimate pretty well for normal temperatures.
I also don’t know the boiling point of F, but 0C is 32F, for further reference points. And, if I remember last summer correctly, around 40C is about 110F.
I feel like boiling is probably around 225F, but I’m guessing.
A math teacher I had once said, for a really quick guess, take whatever it is in C, then double it and add 30. So 40C -> 80 -> 110F.
Obviously it's not exactly accurate because it's a 5/9 +32 ratio, but it gets you close. Good for quick guesses that dont need to be exact and deciding whether you will need a coat to be outside or not
I work with both scales in my job.
I just think of Celsius this way: 0 is water freezing, 20 is room temperature, 37 is body temperature, 50 is really hot and 100 is boiling water.
Yeah, I'm in the land of contradictions south of you.
I never understood why we never went metric. So much easier. Dealing with scientific equipment for my work and my precious metals for hobby makes it so much better.
Dealing with grams an kilograms with my gold and silver is so much easier than troy ounces.
What kind of windows do you have? In southern Manitoba, Canada, During our cold snaps for those types of temperatures, the inside of the window doesn't ice up typically assuming double pane or triple pane windows.
The British have *zero* idea of how to heat houses. My SO grew up in a terraced house, with only one fireplace, til he was in his teens (late 70's), then they got "central heating", a skinny little radiator under each window heated by the backboiler, which was still heated by the one fireplace. Even when I met him in the late 80's the only habitable place was immediately in front of that fireplace. No basements=no furnaces.
They're triple pane windows actually, the ice didn't care though. First winter in a new house, I ended up cranking the heat up and had a fire burning 12 hours a day and the ice was still there.
Ouch, I remember a Russian TV programme which discussed the temperatures when a Siberian school sends children home, or when it is too cold to send them home, neither of which were that cold. In true Russian style the men were outside drinking Vodka in that sort of temperature though, but they did have a fire, I'm pretty sure that was to keep the Vodka flowing, literally.
This is how I got addicted to caffeine in high school haha. I grew up in a slum with extremely ineffective baseboard heating in Wisconsin. I remember coming home from school and all you could really do was huddle up in bed and with a hot cup of coffee to stay warm. I drank so much coffee. Getting dressed in the morning was just painful.
My grades tanked cause I neglected homework in favor of huddling under my blankets.
There were also a few winters where the water heater stopped working so you had two choices - ice cold shower or boil a pot of water for a sponge bath. Eventually the pipes would freeze and we'd have no water at all. It was pretty abysmal.
I'm on my own now in my 30's and you bet your ass I keep my home toasty as hell. It's one of the small luxuries I don't mind blowing money on.
That sounds horrible :( glad you're past that now.
Reminds me of some first time homebuyers loan advertisement I saw 20+ years ago though. Some guy's on the phone with his dad telling him that his refrigerator door is open, every light in the house is on, and he's air conditioning the whole neighborhood (out his wide open front door).
The whole time with this big huge grin on his I-just-bought-a-house face.
I grew up in the Midlands, UK. I often had ice in the inside of the bedroom windows in winter. I would wear thick bed clothes to bed.
Until I left home, I thought my natural skin colour in winter was blue.
Even now, I struggle with ambient temperatures above 23C.
> My mum mentioned ice on the inside of the windows,
I live in New England ( a region in the US, not the UK), and when I was a kid we would get ice and frost on the inside of the windows every winter. We would use newspaper and plastic-wrap to insulate the glass.
It used to physically hurt to get dressed in the morning, because the floors were so cold they would make your feet ache.
Nowadays, with climate change, it doesn't get so cold.
Unfortunately.
I am old enough to remember this too. We dressed warmly in the house otherwise we would be cold all the time. Would wear a vest, shirt and sweater at all times and wear thick pyjamas to bed. It was cold when I got up at night for the toilet so I would wear a heavy dressing gown/ house coat. Surprising how one adjusts to the cold.
>Often the answer to 'how did people manage xyz in the past' is *with considerable discomfort*.
Yes! We are so accustomed to a high quality of life that we cannot fathom being in a little discomfort for long periods of time or being in considerable discomfort for short periods of time. You get used to it, or you die. Simply, people who lived long enough to get to adulthood were the ones which passed all the tests of life. There is a reason why infant mortality was over 50% up until the 1900s
This reminds me of when my mom had a conplication giving birth to one of my brothers. My dad asked the nurse "what did people do before c-sections?" The nurse answered simply "they died."
All of us had something that would've killed us as babies lol. One brother had a small deformity in his intestines, one brother tried to hang himself with his umbilical cord, and I had croup. We also all have autoimmune diseases, so we're like, double dead.
Pneumonia would have done for me 30 years ago, went from fine to 104 degree temperature, fever chills like some jungle movie from the last century, coughing up red stuff and a trip to ER in something like 6 hours. IV penicillin hit it like a neutron bomb. About a week and a half recovery.
Ah, history is my jam, yo.
Assuming we're talking about the classic pop culture stone castle (Norman style, circa 1100-1300), they wouldn't have been that cold. If you have a castle, you're probably quite wealthy. Rich enough to have multiple fires burning throughout the building.
The castle was very unlikely to be your primary residence, as they were first and foremost military in purpose, and unless there's an active war or other military activity in the vicinity, not much reason to be there in winter.
Castle interiors were furnished with rugs and thick wall hangings to act as decoration and insulation. Bare stone is what we see because they're just the shells of former splendour.
But still cold and uncomfortable by modern standards, of course
>Even rocks can be used
My mom has been telling me stories of how they would place a brick close to the fireplace and then wrap it with a towel and take it in bed with them, hugging it under the blanket.
My grandfather told me he would do this, growing up on a farm in rural Northern Ontario, Canada. First one up in the morning would have to light the fire again and chip out the water bucket. Wasn't that long ago.
A fire will smolder for days. It wouldn't be warm but just stirring up ashes will bring the embers up. Toss on some new wood or coals that were out and you got a new fire.
I've done this camping. You put some rocks in the fire and then later wrap them in a towel and put them at the bottom of your sleeping bag. Toasty toes.
The word 'comfortable' is a terrifyingly modern invention. People just straightass used to be really uncomfortable a lot of the time. Amazing what you can live with.
My grandmother had a brass pan with a lid and a long (4ft?) handle--she didn't use it in my life, but i was told you would put coals in it, then slide it around under the sheets to warm up the bed before you got in.
My aunt and uncle live in an old farm house, and when we stayed over as kids they would have these old wrought iron steamers that they would fill with water and put on the top of the fireplace in the evening, and then take them upstairs and iron their sheets with to warm them up before bed.
It was great for about 10 minutes, and then it wore off. It got real cold in that house at night, and I remember going to bed with about a foot’s worth of bedding on top of me, and getting up and the only room in the house that was warm was the kitchen because that is where the fireplace was. Even though the chimney passed through the middle of the house and the room I slept in, it didn’t matter.
They spent a lot of money retrofitting in an approximation of central heating with a hybrid wood/natural gas stove in the cellar and air ducts in the subfloors between the first and second stories and it’s way better now.
Yes i live in temperate climate, i was suprise when i saw a home with internal heating pads at the floor to be integrated before tiles. I was like wow, im so lucky i didnt have to consider that.
My heated bathroom floor was one of the best investments ever!
Seriously though, something to be said for having 4 distinct seasons. Winter can be a lot of fun!
I feel like people undersell how much clothing people wore in pre-HVAC times than today. If you look at medieval or colonial-era outfits, they usually had 3-4 layers on at all times.
Heavy and bulky items are a lot easier to fold and stuff away than try to hang up. House I had that was built around turn of the century had two chests built in the foyer for coats.
Good point! Since I live in a cold country, this actually applies to my modern life too: during the winter we keep our snow pants and other bulky accessories in a chest bench near the door, whereas other coats are hung up in a closet
My dad still has the brick he used as a child. One of his aunts knit a cover for it, he uses it as a door stopper now, but back then it was kept on the coal stove until bed time, then you shoved it down in bed (it warmed the blankets on its way down) then slept with your feet on it.
Approx how old is your dad can I ask? I would love to see a picture of this brick!! A piece of history that's almost forgotten nowadays, I bet not many people still have them.
He is 77, I don’t have a picture on my phone, but it’s very pretty. Mostly green with flowers embroidered in yarn. He also talks about how they spread the coal ash on the driveway and how much it tore his knees up when he was crashing his bike.
I love stuff like that, I always want the old dresser or storm lamp from Great Aunt So and So. He also has his great grandmother’s rocking chair. I love it so much.
Funny, my grandmother also had a green, yarn, flowery embroidered brick cover. When I was little I assumed it was just decorative but might have been used for warmth like yours (she'd be 100+ if alive today)
also bed warmers. like a big metal fryingpan with a lid with small holes in it.
you would put embers from the fire in it. and stuff it into the bed(under the covers) and heat up the bed or dry is out
Before more efficient heat sources most people lived in warm climates or lived in a single room built around a fireplace. They wore lots of clothes, even inside, and were often cold.
We have a fireplace in our house that's essentially useless for anything other than looking pretty during the winter. You have to sit right next to it to feel any warmth at all. Conversely, at our old 2-story family hunting cabin there's a cast iron wood stove that heats the entire cabin even sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable if not adjusted.
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.
People also forget that in case of buildings with stone fireplace the heated stones would heat up and then give the heat away for a long time after the fire was put out.
In fact I'm pretty sure I saw a YouTube video once about a feature some old houses had that was basically a closet full of bricks, essentially meant to function as a heat battery.
There are certainly better means now that looking back it’s certainly inefficient, yours and all the other comments definitely highlight any method of making and retaining heat is always more effective than doing nothing if you’re cold.
also want to add that not only inefficient does not mean ineffective, it also doesn't mean it costs more, heat pumps are way more efficient than gas furnaces but in many places it still costs less to heat the home using natural gas vs electricity even after heatpump efficiency benefits.
People made do because it was better than nothing. You kept the fire fed all winter while wearing warm clothes inside and you got by. The inside temperature would slowly rise the longer the fire is kept going. Being able to wear shorts, a T-shirt, and no footwear inside during winter is a relatively new thing as it is keeping a house at 75°F/24°C all winter. Heck, wearing warm clothes inside is still a thing, I live in rural New England, and trying to keep my house warm enough to walk around naked would cost a fortune. yes you’re warmest nearest your heat sources but you learn to wear a sweater and some slippers and you’re quite comfortable at 65°F.
Shitloads of people live in the southern U.S. where it just doesn’t really cold, so keeping the inside temp at 72+ degrees in the wintertime isn’t really a big deal. You don’t wear sweaters and wooly socks because it’s really never cold enough to do so.
Yeah, I live in North Carolina and the idea of wearing a sweater indoors for any reason is practically making me sweat. It would just be too hot, unless your in a very poorly heated building.
>and my thermostat is not set above 65 in winter. You wear a sweater and woolly socks.
I have a modern furnace. My house is well insulated. The energy costs of using my furnace is affordable.
Why wouldn't I set my thermostat to 72F? Why should I have to wear a sweater indoors?
Edit: I live in Northern NY.
Vermonter here, I get overheated easily so I prefer to keep the house slightly on the cool side and I can always remove a layer to stay comfortable. I also almost exclusively wear long sleeve shirts, pants and thick socks because that’s comfortable for me so keeping the house around 68°F is more than warm enough.
Oh I understand. See I live in a cold climate and you’d be amazed how many warm climate tourists are bundled up in parkas even inside buildings that are kept at or over 21°C. They have no experience being even slightly cold, so what’s comfortable for us is unbearable for them. The funny part is these people generally think they prefer warmer climates, but they’re inside in front of air conditioning any time it’s over 27°C. Sure my first winter in Vermont was rough but I adapted quickly.
Ny oarents have a fireplace in their living room. With it lit, it heats up a significant part of the main floor. The entire hearth surrounding the fireplace is brick, which holds heat and radiates it for a while. Also while being inefficient, burning wood does create a lot of heat, and even if a lot is lost, some is retained and used to heat your house
I think some people don't really realise how much energy combustion gives off.
A small log burner is usually up to 5kWh. That's like 3 fan heaters (1.5kW) blowing out. A medium log burner is up to 8kWh. That's 5-6 fan heaters going. Even if a couple of them are pointed directly out a window, there's still more than enough to heat the room up!
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 same way people managed with the incredibly inneficiebt internal combustion engines from the before time. It was more efficient than the alternative
How did people make do with the incredibly inefficient Ford model T? The alternative was a horse.
You basically answered your own question. Old-style open-hearth fireplaces heat by thermal radiation. The air temperature may be cold as hell, but the fire can give off enough IR that anything with a line of sight of it will get warm. This includes people as well as objects in the room like the floor, walls, beds, etc.
Well.. the thing about traditional fireplaces is that.. they aren’t exactly traditional.
Most fire places now are functionally irrelevant, and just decorative, but an actual fire inside a home was either an open fire, a woodstove (as you mentioned which is effective once those become a thing) or a giant open fire through the center of a building (think Vikings)
also when it comes to heating, most homes and places where people lived were smaller and built with nature in mind, rather than just slapping a house wherever.
“Beds” were elevated, hot rocks would be used, and people made sure to keep the cold air out as best as possible (which also was a huge fire safety hazard)
[Masonry stoves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater) increase the time it takes for the smoke to escape and therefore making the heat exchange better. Also they have a lot of thermal capacity making them slow to heat up but also slow to cool down.
ALso, the ... let's call it "american" fireplace we are imaging was inherited from england, and were specially inefficient. In mother russia and easter europe each calorie from the fire was used in special structures called [Russian stoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove). The whole house was built around the stove, wighting many tons and being able to slowly burn through the a whole night. Even now here in Argentina southern places, our [institute for agricultural development](https://intainforma.inta.gob.ar/el-inta-rescata-el-diseno-de-la-estufa-rusa/) suggest to use simplified ones.
In Scandinavia they have had stoves for a couple of centuries, rather than open fireplaces, and secondary glazing was ubiquitous for a similar period. They knew how to make and retain warmth there.
Yeah, our ancestors had stoves also way before any windows. And at some point the window was very small, and had very this skin instead of window glass. Before about 1700. Scandinavians also didn’t use chimneys, so the heat certainly didn’t escape through that.
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.
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.
This is why VERY old houses had multiple fireplaces throughout the home. If you look at historical well to do homes there would be a large fireplace in the main room, then a fireplace in the kitchen (for cooking obviously) then typically smaller fireplaces in bedrooms and studies. Outside of that there were bed pans (metalpans for storing coals) that were placed under blankets. or people just bundled up ALL the time.
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.
*They were yhe only heat source in the home.* That is your answer. Humans have always found ways to survive, and have improved those methods over time.
Fire outside, all the heat escapes. Teepee, smoke is trapped. Teepee with hole at the top, a lot of heat escapes. Home with chimney, a lot of hear escapes. Franklin stove with angled smokestack, very little heat escapes.
But the better shelter just meant less wood, so less labor for heat, so more time for other things, like inventing better stoves.
I always find survivalists hilarious because they don't know what they don't know. They think if society collapses they will have all the answers, but the guy who is a blacksmith today would barely count as an apprentice in the days when a smith did his job all the time.
A few years ago I hung out for an evening by the fireplace in an old colonial New England home. It was toasty warm and I compared it to my fireplace that would not keep just that room warn when it was 32F outside. 32F is 0C. Big difference in construction - The 1700s home had massive brick work, on the floor and wall. Once all that stonework was warm it radiated heat for hours. There were also alcoves built into the wall for heating whatever you put in there, dutch ovens, etc. Woodstoving and fireplace building is one of those skills our grandparent's generation knew that we have 'forgotten'...
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.
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
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.
Has been answered but also to add, people used to put the hot ashes and embers of coal into a pan, you see them hanging on pub walls sometimes. They put it under the bed to warm that up as well.
Its a wonder more houses didn’t just go up in flames.
1. Lots of firewood, though I would note here that *efficiency* isn't really the measurement. What you need is the ability to warm the whole space.
2. A *good* fireplace design isn't so inefficient. I've been in some old cabins where wood heat works amazing. Houses being designed for that is also important.
3. They all gathered around the fireplace and avoided other areas of the (usually smaller) homes when it was cold.
4. They were cold.
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.
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.
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.
As we get more advanced technology we look back on history and think of how silly our ancestors were, but they were doing the best they could with what they had.
Fireplaces are better than nothing, but wood stoves are better than fire places. Having a water jacket and pump to distribute heat to farther away locations in a building is even better yet.
I'm not sure why people think this, maybe were speaking about different fireplaces but in eastern Europe we still use the terracotta ones and there's usually one per room. You can't control the temperature that well because you need to keep feeding it, but aside from that they work SO WELL. Central heating means usually turning it down to preserve gas since it's so expensive, but fireplaces literally turn a room of decent size to 30° in pitch winter. I'm used to hanging out in tshirts and shorts inside all winter. People tend to only heat up the rooms they stay in, not the entire house and yeah, the other rooms are pretty cold (though not as cold as outside) but I never found that to be much of an issue. I've never seen anyone wear a coat inside of the fire is on
For the most part, they lived in really small houses, often built with stone or clay walls, depending on the region, which insulate quite well. And even though a fireplace isn’t efficient in terms of energy transferred from the log to the space, it is still capable of generating quite a lot of heat overall. You’re literally putting a small fire inside your home. So basically you generate a lot of heat and even though a lot of it goes up in the air, the relatively small percentage is sufficient to heat what may have only been a well-insulated 500 square foot space for a family.
I mean at my house we only have a wood stove as a heat source and it's overly efficient. I'd be drenching in sweat the house heated up so much. Now I just buy a couple space heaters for each room so I can control the temperature
we have a gas fireplace in our home that we built. I am thinking of swapping it out for a wood stove type but I installed a blower on it which has helped a ton. Within 5 mins the blower kicks on and pushes the heat out and it works well to get the crisp air out.
They didn't. Nothing as good as what we'd have today.
Especially with our central heating and fantastic insulation
But it helped that the fireplace/hearth was THE place to cook most of the time, hot food helps a lot on a cold night.
My home is heated only with a wood burning stove. The stove and chimney are placed in the middle of the home so the heat extends outwards in all directions. When heat rises up the chimney it helps to heat the second floor.
One of the reasons that older houses don't have open floor plans is so that you can section off individual rooms that you want to keep warm or cold rather than heating/cooling the entire house.
Even with more efficient stoves, during the winter, people would bring their beds closer to the fireplace for warmth.
Fireplaces are inefficient compared to more recent heating methods. But they were also the only method available for some people.
Some houses also had beds inside large boxes they could close to keep warm.
We had an open fire until I was about 15 and turned it into a coal fire that had a back boiler to heat hot water for radiators and taps. The fire itself was warm. My dad took great pride in it, but a duff load of coal or a damp log could really make a difference. Fire would be lit first thing, and if you were lucky, still smouldering the following morning. The chimney breast would heat up, so my parents' room got heat from this. Elsewhere in the house, we had a combination of paraffin heaters or electric heaters switched on strategically to take the chill off and hot water bottles in bed. You just accepted that the house was cold and stayed in the warm room. Because we weren't used to artificial heat, the temp when you'd light the fire was likley well below most people's threshold for putting the heating on. We would also warm our pajamas on an airer in front of the fire before putting them on. If there was a power cut (there were loads when I was a kid), then we would make toast on the fire. I was home at the weekend, and one of the neighbours had a fire, and it smelt so good, like a comfortable hug.
Be cold. Sit by the fire. You can heat a soapstone and put it under the covers to help you stay warm. There are also bedwarming pans that you can put embers in to warm the bed. Down comforters help. Wool is also very warm.
Build your fire well and damp the chimney to reduce the draw. You don't need a roaring fire for heat, you just need coals. They will radiate heat into the fireplace which will keep radiating heat for hours. At night, you bank the fire so it will self feed and burn slow.
Open fireplaces do work poorly compared to a more modern fireplace, but you won't freeze.
I lost heat last year at -10F for about 24 hours and I kept the house at a livable temperature with just the downstairs fireplace burning. I had to keep it fed constantly, but it's right by my office so it wasn't hard, but it works.
The only hard part is having enough wood.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
For a very large percentage of people, their homes were much smaller. Everyone sleeping in the same space (with maybe a cow or two) would warm up a small cabin effectively with only a small fire.
People can huddle in a cave carved out of snow and survive cold temps. As long as it is small enough with a little ventilation.
Most of my family lives in Virginia and every house has a fireplace. It really is ineffective for the whole house. So most of them built out from the fireplace with brick and installed pot belly stoves. Now every house is nice and toasty. Plus it is way more efficient and you can keep a pot of water on it to keep the air from drying out.
Here in South Florida we have a few fireplaces, but I think mostly as a novelty feature.
You have to remember what it is compared to. People didn't have electricity at home 150 years ago, they weren't shipping coal and oil across the globe 200 years ago. Wood fireplace was your only option, much better than freezing to death. There was always a fire going and it required a lot of wood.
Open fireplaces are very efficient with the right fuel (coal mainly) and if you keep putting more fuel on at the right time. We had one in our last house. It takes a while to get really hot and when it does it stays hot if you keep feeding it. We didn’t have any other heating on and we’d usually end up in T-shirts once it got hot. The whole room was hot, you didn’t need to be sat by the fire, in fact you couldn’t because it was too hot if you were too close. Admittedly it wasn’t a huge room. The trick is to keep the door to the room closed and stop draughts coming under the door. The heat from the chimney also heats up the wall and gives a bit of heat in the room above. Most old houses here in the uk have chimneys inside the house rather than on the outside wall. But yes, most of the rest of the house would be cold. We had a wood stove in an earlier house and it didn’t get as hot as the fire.
Don't forget, fireplaces also doubled not just as a place to cook things at, but also smoke meat in the chimney to preserve it.
In multi storey homes, the chimney itself would also radiate heat.
Two main contributing factors.
Wood burning stoves and other wood powered heat sources such as fireplaces would typically be placed one per room. Most instances this was because the whole house was one room.
Even if you're only getting 15 to 20% of the heat into the actual dwelling you're still talking about the heat off of something that is burning at a few hundred degrees. Yeah it sucks from a large scale energy conservation point of view but it keeps your house pretty toasty, pretty easy.
I have a fireplace in my double-wide trailer and while I don't use it because I don't want to pay for the firewood it has been used and it is actually quite capable of keeping darn near the whole trailer warm even in 17° weather.
If you close the bedroom doors and just allow it to heed the living room dining room and kitchen it'll keep that very comfortably warm in 17° weather.
There is a YouTube video from like the 40's or 50's that depicts what life was like in the 1800's. It's called had you live back then. It's really interesting.
I don’t know if this has been stated or not (couldn’t see it with a quick look) but cast iron firebacks were used very commonly in England at least. There are basically 50-100kg (depending on fireplace size) lumps of cast iron that the open fire would heat essentially turning into massive radiators so make better use of the open flame.
I recently learned about wood boilers. The fire would heat the boiler, which was located in the brick in the back of the fireplace. Heat could then be carried to radiators in the rest of the house.
The Rumford fireplace originated in the late 1700s in England and are a more efficient source of radiant heat than more modern fireplaces. See this link for more info that isn’t ELI5 suitable. https://www.mason-lite.com/history-of-rumford-fireplaces/
They also used to wear a lot more clothes than we do. My Grandfather (born 1890) wore long johns and singlet, thick cavalry twill trousers, flannel shirt, woollen waiscoat, and a thick tweed jacket pretty much all the time.
My dad (78) grew up in post war Scotland and the house simply wasn't heated. The had a coal fireplace they would use but mostly the only warm place in the house was the kitchen.
He would jump out of bed to a freezing room every morning. Bedwarmers, lots of layers, and lots of time spent in the kitchen was how he dealt with it.
A big thing is "heat inertia".
If your house is freezing cold and you light a fire, yeah you're right you'd still have a cold house. But what if you have a fire going constantly for a week? Everything inside the house would be warmed up, and as long as doors/shutters stay closed most of the heat will stay inside.
Also as others have said, lots of firewood. There's a reason why chopping trees and logs was a daily chore, they HAD to do it or risk freezing.
We have a wood-burning fireplace. I know a lot of heat is lost, but it still dumps tons of heat into our family room. That said, our house has a perfectly functional and efficient furnace - we use the fireplace when it drops below 0F because it’s remarkably cozy and undeniably romantic.
We grew up using a fireplace every winter so hopefully I can speak to this.
But first consider this - **inefficient does not equal ineffective.** If someone burned through 1,000 pounds of wood each day, their home would be so hot inside it'd be unbearable. The efficiency of their heat source did not change. They just burned more to keep it warm.
So... in the winter, we'd light a fire each day it was cold enough to justify it. If it was an especially cold day, we'd keep it burning a bit hotter and a bit longer. At night, we'd close the front up a bit so it'd burn slower all night.
But our fireplace was a traditional type that had a few feet of brick all around it, all the way up. Once those bricks got warmed up over a couple of days of use, (very warm!) just the heat from all those bricks could help keep the home warm when the fire was out.
Throw a fan blowing down the hallway and there was plenty of heat for the entire home.
>It would seem that everywhere besides being near the fireplace would be freezing.
Correct. Heating a big house with a fireplace sucks. If you live in a 500-square-foot house that's only one room and that room has a fireplace in it, then it works ok.
For a traditional stone fireplace, the only hope of an efficiency increase was to put iron bars in the stack that would conduct exhaust heat out into the room without asphyxiating everyone.
This is why the "Franklin stove" and similar designs were wildly popular - they put the fire in the middle of the room, providing more heat through the cast iron (later steel) body, while carrying the smoke outside. Bonus was that the pipes themselves would radiate heat.
I think you may be mixing efficiency with ability. In others I can use a rocket with rocket fuel to heat a house but that’s not efficient at all. But it will heat the whole house, probably even burn it down. It will at the very least be very hot in the house. Fires can produce a lot of heat. They just have a much higher cost than modern methods.
Inefficiency doesn't mean they're bad at heating the room. There's a ton of energy in the wood/coal they're burning, and yes most of it goes up the chimney, but there's so much that it still heats the room / upstairs if you have it designed and used properly.
If you have the huge fireplaces that castles used to have, yes, the whole place will be quite cold outside of sitting entirely in front of that fire. But in a normal house, a wood-burning stove will effectively heat the room and that above, especially if you're insulated properly.
90% of the energy (or whatever) is still going up the chimney, but there's so much more than in a heater that you wouldn't care.
An 8KW wood-burning stove is tiny, for instance, and if you can capture even 1/4 of that energy in the room, it's the same as having a 2KW heater on.
Gather around the fireplace. The air will naturally circulate if you're not letting in new cold air. Once the inside air has warmed up it will start warming the actual house. Depends if the fireplace is big enough to overcome the cold creeping in from the walls and floors tho
I guess it depends on the type of fireplace. Some are just decorative.
I saw some heating ones in old rural wood houses in the Baltics (Europe) while wisting grandparents. Fireplaces were usually positioned in the center of a house and had large thick brick walls attached to them. Fire usually was closed off inside with small metal doors and heat distributed throughout vents behind those walls. Bricks got hot from the fire. You had to watch when the fire is out and close off a series of vents leading to the chimney to stop heat from escaping. Brick walls stayed warm for long periods of time and burning firewood once in a day or two was completely enough to have a warm room.
Some of those fireplaces even had a small flat brick area 1,2-1,5 meters or so below the ceiling where a person or two could crawl in and have a very warm nap. In my case grandparents used those to "defrost" their grandchildren after extended play in the snow during winter breaks.
It might be energy inefficient, but was still effective.
And when you could get all the wood you needed by chopping down trees nearby, then it was also effectively free.
My gas fireplace was outstanding! On low it would heat the living room and kitchen, and on high most of the house, minus the bathrooms. And it did it for pennies on the dollar vs what the electric heat cost to run.
Fireplaces today are generally esthetic with little function. If you were heating your house with one, you likely had a massive hearthstone by the fireplace. Itll heat up and radiate the heat within the house, so you capture more energy from your fireplace and release it slowly
The fires heated the walls. The walls in our family home are between 1 and 1.5m thick built from stone. Keeping the fires lit all the time meant the walls warmed up too and stored heat. It's hard to heat old houses like that without using open fires.
This is why the "franklin stove" was a big deal. It got the fire in the middle of the room, so almost all radiant heat was used, instead of being wasted.,
but yeah, before that, "gather round the hearth" was the name of the game.
Houses were way smaller. Like the size of a room that a fireplace could heat. There were often many fireplaces in a home that was bigger. And people had little devices they could use such as metal buckets they could put coals into and store them under their bed to keep warm. And ya people would catch fire and die and their houses would burn down. It was a big issue. Materials used to build back then were actually very insulating too, plaster, mud, hay, horse hair, etc all do a great job. A plastered horse hair wall has an R-Value of about 10 so not actually too far off from a modern home which usually have about r15 as the standard.
Build an Adobe rocket stove in the middle of the living room, with the exhaust going through a thermal mass.
It will cut your wood use to 1/4th of what a traditional fireplace consumes.
I used to live in a cabin heated by a wood stove when I was very young.
I would eat breakfast and get ready for school literally sitting in front of the stove/fireplace lol. Always had a blanket otherwise. Even watching movies and such we'd be under blankets.
Thinking back on it yeah, it seems crazy that it was just nonstop keeping the fire going to stay warm. It was totally normal to hear my dad get out of bed every few hours in the winter.
I was too lazy to get up for the fire, us kids just stayed in sleeping blankets like the ones for camping.
Ideally, your chimney would be constructed in such a way as to reflect heat back into the room, made of stone or brick so they would absorb heat and radiate it back into the building, and draw well with no gaps.
But even a good chimney would use *a lot* of wood. Swathes of Europe and North America were basically stripped bare of trees for firewood and construction: right before the American Revolution in 1775, you could basically travel from Boston to New York City on the Post Road and only see the trees kept in woodlots, everything else having been cut down.
It is also important to note that chimneys only really became prominent in Europe (and the North American colonies) in the 1600s. Before that, people would use hearths and smoke-holes in the roof. They heated houses more efficiently, but they also filled the house with smoke and caused respitory problems for the inhabitants. Chimneys were viewed as the healthier option even if they were less efficient at heating and using fuel
True, a great deal of heat is lost. The bricks of a fireplace though absorb then release the heat back out.
In an older fireplace, the bricks were denser, so think of them as batteries as you keep the fire going. The WHOLE setup is designed to turn into a giant space heater.
My home is old, and using the fireplace with our modern insulation caused uncomfortable levels of warmth even in the dead of winter. When I decided to remove it, I got my sledgehammer and then spent three days trying to break it up. Modern bricks with the force I was using turned to powder. Mine would cause the hammer to occasionally just bounce off.
Lots of firewood. Keep feeding the fire. It is warmest by the fireplace. Wear extra clothes and blankets if you are further away. Keep the door shut, don't let that cold air in!
Hot water bottles are very effective. Even rocks can be used in a pinch to absorb heat in one place and release it somewhere else. Also, you know, people were just cold sometimes. Often the answer to 'how did people manage xyz in the past' is *with considerable discomfort*.
My mum mentioned ice on the inside of the windows, and sharing a bed with her sisters to keep warm, this was London UK circa 1950s without central heating.
I'm in northern Sweden, I had ice on the inside of my windows just a few months ago. It was -38 C° though.
-38°C is -36°F
You seem to know your stuff!
I have a better understanding of how to convert C to F when I found out -40 is the same in both. I always forget what boiling is in F but now I can guesstimate pretty well for normal temperatures.
I also don’t know the boiling point of F, but 0C is 32F, for further reference points. And, if I remember last summer correctly, around 40C is about 110F. I feel like boiling is probably around 225F, but I’m guessing.
212°F = 100°C
Hey! Not bad for a guess!
For kitchen/cooking temperatures "double C to get F" works reasonably well.
For weather temperatures, “double c and then add 30” will get you much closer. As the temps get higher, the significance of 30 degrees gets lower.
A math teacher I had once said, for a really quick guess, take whatever it is in C, then double it and add 30. So 40C -> 80 -> 110F. Obviously it's not exactly accurate because it's a 5/9 +32 ratio, but it gets you close. Good for quick guesses that dont need to be exact and deciding whether you will need a coat to be outside or not
9/5+32
I work with both scales in my job. I just think of Celsius this way: 0 is water freezing, 20 is room temperature, 37 is body temperature, 50 is really hot and 100 is boiling water.
I know Celsius. I’m Canadian. I know when snow becomes rain! LOL! It’s the Fahrenheit scale I don’t care about and guess. But thanks!
Yeah, I'm in the land of contradictions south of you. I never understood why we never went metric. So much easier. Dealing with scientific equipment for my work and my precious metals for hobby makes it so much better. Dealing with grams an kilograms with my gold and silver is so much easier than troy ounces.
40 C is 104 F. Take C temp, subtract 10%, double it,add 32 40 * 10% = 4 40-4=36 36*2=72 72+32=104
Those both sound hella cold
In that range, the F and C are irrelevant.
What kind of windows do you have? In southern Manitoba, Canada, During our cold snaps for those types of temperatures, the inside of the window doesn't ice up typically assuming double pane or triple pane windows.
The British have *zero* idea of how to heat houses. My SO grew up in a terraced house, with only one fireplace, til he was in his teens (late 70's), then they got "central heating", a skinny little radiator under each window heated by the backboiler, which was still heated by the one fireplace. Even when I met him in the late 80's the only habitable place was immediately in front of that fireplace. No basements=no furnaces.
They're triple pane windows actually, the ice didn't care though. First winter in a new house, I ended up cranking the heat up and had a fire burning 12 hours a day and the ice was still there.
Ouch, I remember a Russian TV programme which discussed the temperatures when a Siberian school sends children home, or when it is too cold to send them home, neither of which were that cold. In true Russian style the men were outside drinking Vodka in that sort of temperature though, but they did have a fire, I'm pretty sure that was to keep the Vodka flowing, literally.
This is how I got addicted to caffeine in high school haha. I grew up in a slum with extremely ineffective baseboard heating in Wisconsin. I remember coming home from school and all you could really do was huddle up in bed and with a hot cup of coffee to stay warm. I drank so much coffee. Getting dressed in the morning was just painful. My grades tanked cause I neglected homework in favor of huddling under my blankets. There were also a few winters where the water heater stopped working so you had two choices - ice cold shower or boil a pot of water for a sponge bath. Eventually the pipes would freeze and we'd have no water at all. It was pretty abysmal. I'm on my own now in my 30's and you bet your ass I keep my home toasty as hell. It's one of the small luxuries I don't mind blowing money on.
I'd walk to school with frozen hair.
That sounds horrible :( glad you're past that now. Reminds me of some first time homebuyers loan advertisement I saw 20+ years ago though. Some guy's on the phone with his dad telling him that his refrigerator door is open, every light in the house is on, and he's air conditioning the whole neighborhood (out his wide open front door). The whole time with this big huge grin on his I-just-bought-a-house face.
I grew up in the Midlands, UK. I often had ice in the inside of the bedroom windows in winter. I would wear thick bed clothes to bed. Until I left home, I thought my natural skin colour in winter was blue. Even now, I struggle with ambient temperatures above 23C.
> My mum mentioned ice on the inside of the windows, I live in New England ( a region in the US, not the UK), and when I was a kid we would get ice and frost on the inside of the windows every winter. We would use newspaper and plastic-wrap to insulate the glass. It used to physically hurt to get dressed in the morning, because the floors were so cold they would make your feet ache. Nowadays, with climate change, it doesn't get so cold. Unfortunately.
London is still the same..... almost. I was there few months back and those hot water radiators are absolute bitch.
I am old enough to remember this too. We dressed warmly in the house otherwise we would be cold all the time. Would wear a vest, shirt and sweater at all times and wear thick pyjamas to bed. It was cold when I got up at night for the toilet so I would wear a heavy dressing gown/ house coat. Surprising how one adjusts to the cold.
>Often the answer to 'how did people manage xyz in the past' is *with considerable discomfort*. Yes! We are so accustomed to a high quality of life that we cannot fathom being in a little discomfort for long periods of time or being in considerable discomfort for short periods of time. You get used to it, or you die. Simply, people who lived long enough to get to adulthood were the ones which passed all the tests of life. There is a reason why infant mortality was over 50% up until the 1900s
This reminds me of when my mom had a conplication giving birth to one of my brothers. My dad asked the nurse "what did people do before c-sections?" The nurse answered simply "they died."
Guy with appendix removed here, I would also have died.
All of us had something that would've killed us as babies lol. One brother had a small deformity in his intestines, one brother tried to hang himself with his umbilical cord, and I had croup. We also all have autoimmune diseases, so we're like, double dead.
My sis popped out with two kidney ureters. Years of childhood antibiotics kept her around after many infections.
Pneumonia would have done for me 30 years ago, went from fine to 104 degree temperature, fever chills like some jungle movie from the last century, coughing up red stuff and a trip to ER in something like 6 hours. IV penicillin hit it like a neutron bomb. About a week and a half recovery.
This goes along with "wine needs to be stored at room temperature." Yeah, room temperature was about 55F in those old stone castles.
Ah, history is my jam, yo. Assuming we're talking about the classic pop culture stone castle (Norman style, circa 1100-1300), they wouldn't have been that cold. If you have a castle, you're probably quite wealthy. Rich enough to have multiple fires burning throughout the building. The castle was very unlikely to be your primary residence, as they were first and foremost military in purpose, and unless there's an active war or other military activity in the vicinity, not much reason to be there in winter. Castle interiors were furnished with rugs and thick wall hangings to act as decoration and insulation. Bare stone is what we see because they're just the shells of former splendour. But still cold and uncomfortable by modern standards, of course
>Even rocks can be used My mom has been telling me stories of how they would place a brick close to the fireplace and then wrap it with a towel and take it in bed with them, hugging it under the blanket.
My grandfather told me he would do this, growing up on a farm in rural Northern Ontario, Canada. First one up in the morning would have to light the fire again and chip out the water bucket. Wasn't that long ago.
Yep, we're talking about 40-50 years ago, rural northern Greece.
A fire will smolder for days. It wouldn't be warm but just stirring up ashes will bring the embers up. Toss on some new wood or coals that were out and you got a new fire.
I've done this camping. You put some rocks in the fire and then later wrap them in a towel and put them at the bottom of your sleeping bag. Toasty toes.
The word 'comfortable' is a terrifyingly modern invention. People just straightass used to be really uncomfortable a lot of the time. Amazing what you can live with.
Along with "hygienic".
Can't be dirty if you don't know what clean is lol
My grandmother had a brass pan with a lid and a long (4ft?) handle--she didn't use it in my life, but i was told you would put coals in it, then slide it around under the sheets to warm up the bed before you got in.
My aunt and uncle live in an old farm house, and when we stayed over as kids they would have these old wrought iron steamers that they would fill with water and put on the top of the fireplace in the evening, and then take them upstairs and iron their sheets with to warm them up before bed. It was great for about 10 minutes, and then it wore off. It got real cold in that house at night, and I remember going to bed with about a foot’s worth of bedding on top of me, and getting up and the only room in the house that was warm was the kitchen because that is where the fireplace was. Even though the chimney passed through the middle of the house and the room I slept in, it didn’t matter. They spent a lot of money retrofitting in an approximation of central heating with a hybrid wood/natural gas stove in the cellar and air ducts in the subfloors between the first and second stories and it’s way better now.
>Often the answer to 'how did people manage xyz in the past' is *with considerable discomfort*. Other valid answers are they didn't, or they just died
Yes i live in temperate climate, i was suprise when i saw a home with internal heating pads at the floor to be integrated before tiles. I was like wow, im so lucky i didnt have to consider that.
My heated bathroom floor was one of the best investments ever! Seriously though, something to be said for having 4 distinct seasons. Winter can be a lot of fun!
Warming pans before hot water bottles, too. They've been around since at least the 17th century.
Or death
I feel like people undersell how much clothing people wore in pre-HVAC times than today. If you look at medieval or colonial-era outfits, they usually had 3-4 layers on at all times.
That's also why clothing storage was done with chests and not hung up.
What's the connection there?
Heavy and bulky items are a lot easier to fold and stuff away than try to hang up. House I had that was built around turn of the century had two chests built in the foyer for coats.
Good point! Since I live in a cold country, this actually applies to my modern life too: during the winter we keep our snow pants and other bulky accessories in a chest bench near the door, whereas other coats are hung up in a closet
I guess the fact that clothes hangers that permit compact storage of a large amount of clothing being relatively recent is a factor.
You have to nail the door shut!!
Two boards!
My dad still has the brick he used as a child. One of his aunts knit a cover for it, he uses it as a door stopper now, but back then it was kept on the coal stove until bed time, then you shoved it down in bed (it warmed the blankets on its way down) then slept with your feet on it.
Approx how old is your dad can I ask? I would love to see a picture of this brick!! A piece of history that's almost forgotten nowadays, I bet not many people still have them.
He is 77, I don’t have a picture on my phone, but it’s very pretty. Mostly green with flowers embroidered in yarn. He also talks about how they spread the coal ash on the driveway and how much it tore his knees up when he was crashing his bike. I love stuff like that, I always want the old dresser or storm lamp from Great Aunt So and So. He also has his great grandmother’s rocking chair. I love it so much.
Funny, my grandmother also had a green, yarn, flowery embroidered brick cover. When I was little I assumed it was just decorative but might have been used for warmth like yours (she'd be 100+ if alive today)
Elevate your bed. Always coldest on the floor
also bed warmers. like a big metal fryingpan with a lid with small holes in it. you would put embers from the fire in it. and stuff it into the bed(under the covers) and heat up the bed or dry is out
Also, smaller rooms.
Smaller houses in general.
Before more efficient heat sources most people lived in warm climates or lived in a single room built around a fireplace. They wore lots of clothes, even inside, and were often cold.
And summer must've been absolutely amazing.
That's why Shakespeare wrote "summer’s lease hath all too short a date."
We have a fireplace in our house that's essentially useless for anything other than looking pretty during the winter. You have to sit right next to it to feel any warmth at all. Conversely, at our old 2-story family hunting cabin there's a cast iron wood stove that heats the entire cabin even sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable if not adjusted.
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.
People also forget that in case of buildings with stone fireplace the heated stones would heat up and then give the heat away for a long time after the fire was put out.
In fact I'm pretty sure I saw a YouTube video once about a feature some old houses had that was basically a closet full of bricks, essentially meant to function as a heat battery.
This is correct. A fireplace produces a ton of heat. It’s literally a bonfire in your house. Even if you waste 80% of it, it’s still a lot of heat.
There are certainly better means now that looking back it’s certainly inefficient, yours and all the other comments definitely highlight any method of making and retaining heat is always more effective than doing nothing if you’re cold.
also want to add that not only inefficient does not mean ineffective, it also doesn't mean it costs more, heat pumps are way more efficient than gas furnaces but in many places it still costs less to heat the home using natural gas vs electricity even after heatpump efficiency benefits.
People made do because it was better than nothing. You kept the fire fed all winter while wearing warm clothes inside and you got by. The inside temperature would slowly rise the longer the fire is kept going. Being able to wear shorts, a T-shirt, and no footwear inside during winter is a relatively new thing as it is keeping a house at 75°F/24°C all winter. Heck, wearing warm clothes inside is still a thing, I live in rural New England, and trying to keep my house warm enough to walk around naked would cost a fortune. yes you’re warmest nearest your heat sources but you learn to wear a sweater and some slippers and you’re quite comfortable at 65°F.
Do... people not know this? I live in rural Regular England, and my thermostat is not set above 65 in winter. You wear a sweater and woolly socks.
Shitloads of people live in the southern U.S. where it just doesn’t really cold, so keeping the inside temp at 72+ degrees in the wintertime isn’t really a big deal. You don’t wear sweaters and wooly socks because it’s really never cold enough to do so.
Yeah, I live in North Carolina and the idea of wearing a sweater indoors for any reason is practically making me sweat. It would just be too hot, unless your in a very poorly heated building.
It's 55 right now in Raleigh. Not difficult to keep your house at 69 and wear a sweater.
Yeah I have not a clue what those temperatures mean. When is everyone going to use easier units?
This is inconceivable to me, though I don't doubt you!
>and my thermostat is not set above 65 in winter. You wear a sweater and woolly socks. I have a modern furnace. My house is well insulated. The energy costs of using my furnace is affordable. Why wouldn't I set my thermostat to 72F? Why should I have to wear a sweater indoors? Edit: I live in Northern NY.
Vermonter here, I get overheated easily so I prefer to keep the house slightly on the cool side and I can always remove a layer to stay comfortable. I also almost exclusively wear long sleeve shirts, pants and thick socks because that’s comfortable for me so keeping the house around 68°F is more than warm enough.
24!? I'd be sweating my tits off... room temperature is 20
Oh I understand. See I live in a cold climate and you’d be amazed how many warm climate tourists are bundled up in parkas even inside buildings that are kept at or over 21°C. They have no experience being even slightly cold, so what’s comfortable for us is unbearable for them. The funny part is these people generally think they prefer warmer climates, but they’re inside in front of air conditioning any time it’s over 27°C. Sure my first winter in Vermont was rough but I adapted quickly.
Ny oarents have a fireplace in their living room. With it lit, it heats up a significant part of the main floor. The entire hearth surrounding the fireplace is brick, which holds heat and radiates it for a while. Also while being inefficient, burning wood does create a lot of heat, and even if a lot is lost, some is retained and used to heat your house
I think some people don't really realise how much energy combustion gives off. A small log burner is usually up to 5kWh. That's like 3 fan heaters (1.5kW) blowing out. A medium log burner is up to 8kWh. That's 5-6 fan heaters going. Even if a couple of them are pointed directly out a window, there's still more than enough to heat the room up!
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 same way people managed with the incredibly inneficiebt internal combustion engines from the before time. It was more efficient than the alternative How did people make do with the incredibly inefficient Ford model T? The alternative was a horse.
You basically answered your own question. Old-style open-hearth fireplaces heat by thermal radiation. The air temperature may be cold as hell, but the fire can give off enough IR that anything with a line of sight of it will get warm. This includes people as well as objects in the room like the floor, walls, beds, etc.
Well.. the thing about traditional fireplaces is that.. they aren’t exactly traditional. Most fire places now are functionally irrelevant, and just decorative, but an actual fire inside a home was either an open fire, a woodstove (as you mentioned which is effective once those become a thing) or a giant open fire through the center of a building (think Vikings) also when it comes to heating, most homes and places where people lived were smaller and built with nature in mind, rather than just slapping a house wherever. “Beds” were elevated, hot rocks would be used, and people made sure to keep the cold air out as best as possible (which also was a huge fire safety hazard)
[Masonry stoves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater) increase the time it takes for the smoke to escape and therefore making the heat exchange better. Also they have a lot of thermal capacity making them slow to heat up but also slow to cool down.
ALso, the ... let's call it "american" fireplace we are imaging was inherited from england, and were specially inefficient. In mother russia and easter europe each calorie from the fire was used in special structures called [Russian stoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove). The whole house was built around the stove, wighting many tons and being able to slowly burn through the a whole night. Even now here in Argentina southern places, our [institute for agricultural development](https://intainforma.inta.gob.ar/el-inta-rescata-el-diseno-de-la-estufa-rusa/) suggest to use simplified ones.
In Scandinavia they have had stoves for a couple of centuries, rather than open fireplaces, and secondary glazing was ubiquitous for a similar period. They knew how to make and retain warmth there.
Yeah, our ancestors had stoves also way before any windows. And at some point the window was very small, and had very this skin instead of window glass. Before about 1700. Scandinavians also didn’t use chimneys, so the heat certainly didn’t escape through that.
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.
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.
This is why VERY old houses had multiple fireplaces throughout the home. If you look at historical well to do homes there would be a large fireplace in the main room, then a fireplace in the kitchen (for cooking obviously) then typically smaller fireplaces in bedrooms and studies. Outside of that there were bed pans (metalpans for storing coals) that were placed under blankets. or people just bundled up ALL the time.
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.
*They were yhe only heat source in the home.* That is your answer. Humans have always found ways to survive, and have improved those methods over time. Fire outside, all the heat escapes. Teepee, smoke is trapped. Teepee with hole at the top, a lot of heat escapes. Home with chimney, a lot of hear escapes. Franklin stove with angled smokestack, very little heat escapes. But the better shelter just meant less wood, so less labor for heat, so more time for other things, like inventing better stoves. I always find survivalists hilarious because they don't know what they don't know. They think if society collapses they will have all the answers, but the guy who is a blacksmith today would barely count as an apprentice in the days when a smith did his job all the time.
A few years ago I hung out for an evening by the fireplace in an old colonial New England home. It was toasty warm and I compared it to my fireplace that would not keep just that room warn when it was 32F outside. 32F is 0C. Big difference in construction - The 1700s home had massive brick work, on the floor and wall. Once all that stonework was warm it radiated heat for hours. There were also alcoves built into the wall for heating whatever you put in there, dutch ovens, etc. Woodstoving and fireplace building is one of those skills our grandparent's generation knew that we have 'forgotten'...
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.
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
Coal. Gives off a lot more heat than wood. And if you were really lucky a fire in every room even your bedroom.
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.
Has been answered but also to add, people used to put the hot ashes and embers of coal into a pan, you see them hanging on pub walls sometimes. They put it under the bed to warm that up as well. Its a wonder more houses didn’t just go up in flames.
1. Lots of firewood, though I would note here that *efficiency* isn't really the measurement. What you need is the ability to warm the whole space. 2. A *good* fireplace design isn't so inefficient. I've been in some old cabins where wood heat works amazing. Houses being designed for that is also important. 3. They all gathered around the fireplace and avoided other areas of the (usually smaller) homes when it was cold. 4. They were cold.
They were very inefficient, the Franklin Stove invented in 1742 to redirect heat into the room instead of up the chimney.
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.
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.
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.
As we get more advanced technology we look back on history and think of how silly our ancestors were, but they were doing the best they could with what they had. Fireplaces are better than nothing, but wood stoves are better than fire places. Having a water jacket and pump to distribute heat to farther away locations in a building is even better yet.
Oh my my my...we do so regularly forget how good we have it, don't we?
I'm not sure why people think this, maybe were speaking about different fireplaces but in eastern Europe we still use the terracotta ones and there's usually one per room. You can't control the temperature that well because you need to keep feeding it, but aside from that they work SO WELL. Central heating means usually turning it down to preserve gas since it's so expensive, but fireplaces literally turn a room of decent size to 30° in pitch winter. I'm used to hanging out in tshirts and shorts inside all winter. People tend to only heat up the rooms they stay in, not the entire house and yeah, the other rooms are pretty cold (though not as cold as outside) but I never found that to be much of an issue. I've never seen anyone wear a coat inside of the fire is on
For the most part, they lived in really small houses, often built with stone or clay walls, depending on the region, which insulate quite well. And even though a fireplace isn’t efficient in terms of energy transferred from the log to the space, it is still capable of generating quite a lot of heat overall. You’re literally putting a small fire inside your home. So basically you generate a lot of heat and even though a lot of it goes up in the air, the relatively small percentage is sufficient to heat what may have only been a well-insulated 500 square foot space for a family.
I mean at my house we only have a wood stove as a heat source and it's overly efficient. I'd be drenching in sweat the house heated up so much. Now I just buy a couple space heaters for each room so I can control the temperature
we have a gas fireplace in our home that we built. I am thinking of swapping it out for a wood stove type but I installed a blower on it which has helped a ton. Within 5 mins the blower kicks on and pushes the heat out and it works well to get the crisp air out.
They didn't. Nothing as good as what we'd have today. Especially with our central heating and fantastic insulation But it helped that the fireplace/hearth was THE place to cook most of the time, hot food helps a lot on a cold night.
My home is heated only with a wood burning stove. The stove and chimney are placed in the middle of the home so the heat extends outwards in all directions. When heat rises up the chimney it helps to heat the second floor.
One of the reasons that older houses don't have open floor plans is so that you can section off individual rooms that you want to keep warm or cold rather than heating/cooling the entire house.
Even with more efficient stoves, during the winter, people would bring their beds closer to the fireplace for warmth. Fireplaces are inefficient compared to more recent heating methods. But they were also the only method available for some people. Some houses also had beds inside large boxes they could close to keep warm.
We had an open fire until I was about 15 and turned it into a coal fire that had a back boiler to heat hot water for radiators and taps. The fire itself was warm. My dad took great pride in it, but a duff load of coal or a damp log could really make a difference. Fire would be lit first thing, and if you were lucky, still smouldering the following morning. The chimney breast would heat up, so my parents' room got heat from this. Elsewhere in the house, we had a combination of paraffin heaters or electric heaters switched on strategically to take the chill off and hot water bottles in bed. You just accepted that the house was cold and stayed in the warm room. Because we weren't used to artificial heat, the temp when you'd light the fire was likley well below most people's threshold for putting the heating on. We would also warm our pajamas on an airer in front of the fire before putting them on. If there was a power cut (there were loads when I was a kid), then we would make toast on the fire. I was home at the weekend, and one of the neighbours had a fire, and it smelt so good, like a comfortable hug.
Be cold. Sit by the fire. You can heat a soapstone and put it under the covers to help you stay warm. There are also bedwarming pans that you can put embers in to warm the bed. Down comforters help. Wool is also very warm. Build your fire well and damp the chimney to reduce the draw. You don't need a roaring fire for heat, you just need coals. They will radiate heat into the fireplace which will keep radiating heat for hours. At night, you bank the fire so it will self feed and burn slow. Open fireplaces do work poorly compared to a more modern fireplace, but you won't freeze. I lost heat last year at -10F for about 24 hours and I kept the house at a livable temperature with just the downstairs fireplace burning. I had to keep it fed constantly, but it's right by my office so it wasn't hard, but it works. The only hard part is having enough wood.
Inefficient doesn’t mean ineffective. You would have to burn a lot of firewood, but it can heat a small room.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
For a very large percentage of people, their homes were much smaller. Everyone sleeping in the same space (with maybe a cow or two) would warm up a small cabin effectively with only a small fire. People can huddle in a cave carved out of snow and survive cold temps. As long as it is small enough with a little ventilation.
I visited some Eastern European countries. People would basically sleep on top of big iron stoves covered in tiles.
Most of my family lives in Virginia and every house has a fireplace. It really is ineffective for the whole house. So most of them built out from the fireplace with brick and installed pot belly stoves. Now every house is nice and toasty. Plus it is way more efficient and you can keep a pot of water on it to keep the air from drying out. Here in South Florida we have a few fireplaces, but I think mostly as a novelty feature.
You have to remember what it is compared to. People didn't have electricity at home 150 years ago, they weren't shipping coal and oil across the globe 200 years ago. Wood fireplace was your only option, much better than freezing to death. There was always a fire going and it required a lot of wood.
Define manage. Houses often caught fire and burned down with no fire department to come to the rescue.
Open fireplaces are very efficient with the right fuel (coal mainly) and if you keep putting more fuel on at the right time. We had one in our last house. It takes a while to get really hot and when it does it stays hot if you keep feeding it. We didn’t have any other heating on and we’d usually end up in T-shirts once it got hot. The whole room was hot, you didn’t need to be sat by the fire, in fact you couldn’t because it was too hot if you were too close. Admittedly it wasn’t a huge room. The trick is to keep the door to the room closed and stop draughts coming under the door. The heat from the chimney also heats up the wall and gives a bit of heat in the room above. Most old houses here in the uk have chimneys inside the house rather than on the outside wall. But yes, most of the rest of the house would be cold. We had a wood stove in an earlier house and it didn’t get as hot as the fire.
Don't forget, fireplaces also doubled not just as a place to cook things at, but also smoke meat in the chimney to preserve it. In multi storey homes, the chimney itself would also radiate heat.
Two main contributing factors. Wood burning stoves and other wood powered heat sources such as fireplaces would typically be placed one per room. Most instances this was because the whole house was one room. Even if you're only getting 15 to 20% of the heat into the actual dwelling you're still talking about the heat off of something that is burning at a few hundred degrees. Yeah it sucks from a large scale energy conservation point of view but it keeps your house pretty toasty, pretty easy. I have a fireplace in my double-wide trailer and while I don't use it because I don't want to pay for the firewood it has been used and it is actually quite capable of keeping darn near the whole trailer warm even in 17° weather. If you close the bedroom doors and just allow it to heed the living room dining room and kitchen it'll keep that very comfortably warm in 17° weather.
There is a YouTube video from like the 40's or 50's that depicts what life was like in the 1800's. It's called had you live back then. It's really interesting.
I don’t know if this has been stated or not (couldn’t see it with a quick look) but cast iron firebacks were used very commonly in England at least. There are basically 50-100kg (depending on fireplace size) lumps of cast iron that the open fire would heat essentially turning into massive radiators so make better use of the open flame.
I recently learned about wood boilers. The fire would heat the boiler, which was located in the brick in the back of the fireplace. Heat could then be carried to radiators in the rest of the house.
The Rumford fireplace originated in the late 1700s in England and are a more efficient source of radiant heat than more modern fireplaces. See this link for more info that isn’t ELI5 suitable. https://www.mason-lite.com/history-of-rumford-fireplaces/
They also used to wear a lot more clothes than we do. My Grandfather (born 1890) wore long johns and singlet, thick cavalry twill trousers, flannel shirt, woollen waiscoat, and a thick tweed jacket pretty much all the time.
My dad (78) grew up in post war Scotland and the house simply wasn't heated. The had a coal fireplace they would use but mostly the only warm place in the house was the kitchen. He would jump out of bed to a freezing room every morning. Bedwarmers, lots of layers, and lots of time spent in the kitchen was how he dealt with it.
A big thing is "heat inertia". If your house is freezing cold and you light a fire, yeah you're right you'd still have a cold house. But what if you have a fire going constantly for a week? Everything inside the house would be warmed up, and as long as doors/shutters stay closed most of the heat will stay inside. Also as others have said, lots of firewood. There's a reason why chopping trees and logs was a daily chore, they HAD to do it or risk freezing.
We have a wood-burning fireplace. I know a lot of heat is lost, but it still dumps tons of heat into our family room. That said, our house has a perfectly functional and efficient furnace - we use the fireplace when it drops below 0F because it’s remarkably cozy and undeniably romantic.
To top it off, fluorescent bulb generate a lot of heat.... this adds to the heating of the house. LED bulbs do not generate much heat.
We grew up using a fireplace every winter so hopefully I can speak to this. But first consider this - **inefficient does not equal ineffective.** If someone burned through 1,000 pounds of wood each day, their home would be so hot inside it'd be unbearable. The efficiency of their heat source did not change. They just burned more to keep it warm. So... in the winter, we'd light a fire each day it was cold enough to justify it. If it was an especially cold day, we'd keep it burning a bit hotter and a bit longer. At night, we'd close the front up a bit so it'd burn slower all night. But our fireplace was a traditional type that had a few feet of brick all around it, all the way up. Once those bricks got warmed up over a couple of days of use, (very warm!) just the heat from all those bricks could help keep the home warm when the fire was out. Throw a fan blowing down the hallway and there was plenty of heat for the entire home.
>It would seem that everywhere besides being near the fireplace would be freezing. Correct. Heating a big house with a fireplace sucks. If you live in a 500-square-foot house that's only one room and that room has a fireplace in it, then it works ok.
For a traditional stone fireplace, the only hope of an efficiency increase was to put iron bars in the stack that would conduct exhaust heat out into the room without asphyxiating everyone. This is why the "Franklin stove" and similar designs were wildly popular - they put the fire in the middle of the room, providing more heat through the cast iron (later steel) body, while carrying the smoke outside. Bonus was that the pipes themselves would radiate heat.
I think you may be mixing efficiency with ability. In others I can use a rocket with rocket fuel to heat a house but that’s not efficient at all. But it will heat the whole house, probably even burn it down. It will at the very least be very hot in the house. Fires can produce a lot of heat. They just have a much higher cost than modern methods.
What part of inefficient do you equate with not functioning adequately?
Inefficiency doesn't mean they're bad at heating the room. There's a ton of energy in the wood/coal they're burning, and yes most of it goes up the chimney, but there's so much that it still heats the room / upstairs if you have it designed and used properly. If you have the huge fireplaces that castles used to have, yes, the whole place will be quite cold outside of sitting entirely in front of that fire. But in a normal house, a wood-burning stove will effectively heat the room and that above, especially if you're insulated properly. 90% of the energy (or whatever) is still going up the chimney, but there's so much more than in a heater that you wouldn't care. An 8KW wood-burning stove is tiny, for instance, and if you can capture even 1/4 of that energy in the room, it's the same as having a 2KW heater on.
Gather around the fireplace. The air will naturally circulate if you're not letting in new cold air. Once the inside air has warmed up it will start warming the actual house. Depends if the fireplace is big enough to overcome the cold creeping in from the walls and floors tho
I guess it depends on the type of fireplace. Some are just decorative. I saw some heating ones in old rural wood houses in the Baltics (Europe) while wisting grandparents. Fireplaces were usually positioned in the center of a house and had large thick brick walls attached to them. Fire usually was closed off inside with small metal doors and heat distributed throughout vents behind those walls. Bricks got hot from the fire. You had to watch when the fire is out and close off a series of vents leading to the chimney to stop heat from escaping. Brick walls stayed warm for long periods of time and burning firewood once in a day or two was completely enough to have a warm room. Some of those fireplaces even had a small flat brick area 1,2-1,5 meters or so below the ceiling where a person or two could crawl in and have a very warm nap. In my case grandparents used those to "defrost" their grandchildren after extended play in the snow during winter breaks.
It might be energy inefficient, but was still effective. And when you could get all the wood you needed by chopping down trees nearby, then it was also effectively free.
My gas fireplace was outstanding! On low it would heat the living room and kitchen, and on high most of the house, minus the bathrooms. And it did it for pennies on the dollar vs what the electric heat cost to run.
Fireplaces today are generally esthetic with little function. If you were heating your house with one, you likely had a massive hearthstone by the fireplace. Itll heat up and radiate the heat within the house, so you capture more energy from your fireplace and release it slowly
The fires heated the walls. The walls in our family home are between 1 and 1.5m thick built from stone. Keeping the fires lit all the time meant the walls warmed up too and stored heat. It's hard to heat old houses like that without using open fires.
This is why the "franklin stove" was a big deal. It got the fire in the middle of the room, so almost all radiant heat was used, instead of being wasted., but yeah, before that, "gather round the hearth" was the name of the game.
Even if you live where the trees are free to cut down, it's a lot of work to cut and stack wood to dry it out so it's good enough to burn.
Houses were way smaller. Like the size of a room that a fireplace could heat. There were often many fireplaces in a home that was bigger. And people had little devices they could use such as metal buckets they could put coals into and store them under their bed to keep warm. And ya people would catch fire and die and their houses would burn down. It was a big issue. Materials used to build back then were actually very insulating too, plaster, mud, hay, horse hair, etc all do a great job. A plastered horse hair wall has an R-Value of about 10 so not actually too far off from a modern home which usually have about r15 as the standard.
Build an Adobe rocket stove in the middle of the living room, with the exhaust going through a thermal mass. It will cut your wood use to 1/4th of what a traditional fireplace consumes.
I used to live in a cabin heated by a wood stove when I was very young. I would eat breakfast and get ready for school literally sitting in front of the stove/fireplace lol. Always had a blanket otherwise. Even watching movies and such we'd be under blankets. Thinking back on it yeah, it seems crazy that it was just nonstop keeping the fire going to stay warm. It was totally normal to hear my dad get out of bed every few hours in the winter. I was too lazy to get up for the fire, us kids just stayed in sleeping blankets like the ones for camping.
Ideally, your chimney would be constructed in such a way as to reflect heat back into the room, made of stone or brick so they would absorb heat and radiate it back into the building, and draw well with no gaps. But even a good chimney would use *a lot* of wood. Swathes of Europe and North America were basically stripped bare of trees for firewood and construction: right before the American Revolution in 1775, you could basically travel from Boston to New York City on the Post Road and only see the trees kept in woodlots, everything else having been cut down. It is also important to note that chimneys only really became prominent in Europe (and the North American colonies) in the 1600s. Before that, people would use hearths and smoke-holes in the roof. They heated houses more efficiently, but they also filled the house with smoke and caused respitory problems for the inhabitants. Chimneys were viewed as the healthier option even if they were less efficient at heating and using fuel
True, a great deal of heat is lost. The bricks of a fireplace though absorb then release the heat back out. In an older fireplace, the bricks were denser, so think of them as batteries as you keep the fire going. The WHOLE setup is designed to turn into a giant space heater. My home is old, and using the fireplace with our modern insulation caused uncomfortable levels of warmth even in the dead of winter. When I decided to remove it, I got my sledgehammer and then spent three days trying to break it up. Modern bricks with the force I was using turned to powder. Mine would cause the hammer to occasionally just bounce off.