How to stay warm
Currently reading the so far excellent "The Domestic Revolution" by Ruth Goodman (thanks Meguey Baker for the rec!), which explores the shift from heating British homes primarily with wood to primarily with coal around the 1600s. This had huge effects! Coal (especially the coat they were burning then, from near Newcastle) was much smokier, and had a lower-lying smoke. This means that you need a chimney to burn it, which reduces the heat output and causes a draught along the floor. This means you want to have furniture to lift yourself off the floor when sleeping or lounging - and it also means that you want to live in smaller rooms, rather than having one big open space. The chimney dealing with the smoke means too that the upper areas of the house are not full of smoke - allowing multiple levels to be built within the house. Such a change in how you live - not the whole household within one large space, but instead living within separate rooms, and in the evening maybe crowded into a living room where the heat is.
And that setup is familiar to me from visiting my gran's house. Heating had been introduced into other rooms, but in the form of crappy electric heaters - if we stayed around at Christmas, the evening was best spent in the living room by the coal fire*, or in the kitchen (or the dining room, which sat between the two). Nipping to the loo, either upstairs or outside near the kitchen, was something you did quickly - it was cold!
And, as Ruth Goodman says, the introduction of central heating & double glazing changes this again. The idea that you can heat the entire house means that you don't just have a single room to crowd in again. It becomes much more feasible to have open plan layouts. You knock through between the living room and dining rooms. The kitchen joins along, too. The idea of teenagers retreating to their bedrooms becomes much more feasible.
And I was thinking about this, and about the fact that one of the jobs I want to do on my place, a 1960s era ex council flat, is to get rid of some unnecessary boxing in the bathroom. It's boxing containing original air ducts - when this flat was built it was not built with the combi boiler & radiators I bought it with (or, indeed, the combi boiler and radiators I had installed shortly after moving in, when it turned out that the existing ones didn't work reliably). Instead, it had... well, I'm not sure exactly, but I think it was a forced air heating system and a heated water tank. This ran in a cupboard off the living room built for the purpose, and then vented presumably directly into the living room, and also down through a hole in the floor to the bathroom, hallway & bedrooms (not sure how it got to the second bedroom, but probably that ductwork has been torn out).
Trying to see more details on this, I searched, and I stumbled across this old debate on Hansard from 1978. Funny to read about damp problems, soaring cost of living, a lack of insulation, badly built new houses... But also of councils who consider it their job to directly build these things. God it is depressing to read something starting with "In this country we take some pride in the fact that by partnership between central Government and local authorities, the latter having done the major part of the work, we have housed millions of people in modern council houses in the post-war years.". An impossible dream, these days!
Anway, funny to reflect on these kinds of sudden shifts in how we stay warm, and indeed how we live as a result of that. I can see the start of a similar transition happening with heat pumps - if the renewables revolution keeps happening and the price of electricity drops as it seems like it might (but, uh, more volatile, and maybe more of an emphasis on off-peak versus peak pricing). And heat pumps become more affordable. When I was replacing the boiler here I looked at them - they didn't make sense here (not much outside space, no ground, current high electricity prices). How will the shift to heating which does not turn on at particular times of day but instead is best left heating continuously change how we live? Will there be a big shift to underfloor heating (for a big radiative surface, helpful for the low intensity of heat pumps). Are we all gonna start sitting on the floor again?
[* or the 2 bar electric heater that got put in front of it. or the other heater attached to the wall in the corner. the point is that it was more economic to heat only a single room of the house]
comments:
so neat. this effect is all over the place. I live in rural northern California which is a relatively young place but old for the state, and you can traverse opposing gradients of elevation, heat source, era of 19/20c building standards, that create all these different combinations. Kerosene popularity informing the placement of kitchens in the 60/70s, vanity fireplaces of the 90s shelled out to house pellet stoves in the 2010s, etc.. A whole bunch of floor plans of late 19c homes called “miner houses” are displaced fractals that spiral out from centered kitchen/bathrooms and track 20c trends through ad-hoc add-ons that reflect ceiling height and trim/closet preferences. Super weird/fun/interesting.