IX
METHODS OF HEATING
System Adapted to the Small House
The heating problem for the small house was for our ancestors a very simple mechanical device, consisting, as we all know, of either the fireplace or the stove. The former method still has a charm which we are not willing to dispense with, although we do not depend upon its efficiency to do the actual work of warming, but install some more complicated system, such as a steam heating-plant, to perform the practical work. A fireplace has a sentimental and intellectual warmth that no radiator can supply.
Even the stove has a certain fascination for many, recalling cold wintry nights when the family sat about the red-hot casting, the women knitting and the men burning their shoe-leather and smoking. Some advocates of the stove are so energetic in their arguments concerning the efficiency of this method of heating that one almost doubts the defects which lead inventors to manufacture other devices. But the housewife knows the labor of shovelling coal into three or four stoves, knows the great clouds of hot, fine ashes which rise into the atmosphere and settle upon the shelves, the tops of picture-frames, and the polished surface of the piano.
| Warm-Air Furnace with Pipes | Steam Heat—One-pipe |
| Steam Heat—Two-pipes | Hot Water Heating |
And the inventor saw the tired, worn look of the housewife, removed the stove to the cellar and installed tin pipes from this central heater to the various rooms, and then waited for applause and purchasers. It seemed so simple, but it did not solve the problem entirely, for when the wind blew from the north into the windows, it pressed out the warm air from the exposed rooms, forced it down the pipes up through which it was supposed to come, and then rushed it up the flues on the south or warm side of the house, overheating this part and leaving the cold rooms of the house unheated. The drum of the furnace over which the air passed to receive its warmth from the burning coal would leak every time fresh fuel was added, for the odor of coal-gas became very evident throughout the house. Moreover, the heat was very dry and unpleasant, so that water-jars had to be set about to moisten the air.