The heating of old houses

Joful said:

but I wonder, how many stoves would have been common in a house of given size?

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A good example would be the Parry Mansion in New Hope. Take a tour. You will see a stove in each room on the main floor.

I know my grandmother back in the 60's, in the Adirondack Mountain Champlain region/Essex County of New York, heated their old turn of the century farm house with a cook stove and a parlor stove. I also remember stove pipe running inside, providing additional heat in the upper bedrooms. My aunt and uncle nearby, had a big wood stove installed in the basement that seemed to take gigantic rounds. it had a central grate in the floor and ceiling grates for the second floor for the air to pass. it also had a chain operated draft to control the burn not too far away from the grate. Most of my family in that area were loggers and quite adept at cutting firewood. Most of my cousins still are.

10 thimbles ,nearly 1 in each room, house was heated by coal and wood stoves.
converted to oil and wood with electric also.
Now 2 wood stoves with oil and electric back-up.

I don't know the time frame but there used to be a big old woodfurnace in the basement. There was no ductwork. In the floor under the archway between the living room and dining room was a large grate, I think well over three feet square, maybe closer to four feet sq.. On the trim on the side of the arch you can still see where the chain pulley was mounted. I thought it was pretty neat that even way back then they were ingenious enough to control the draft without trecking downstairs. In the ceilings of the dining and living rooms are two ornate vents that allowed heat to rise to the upstairs bedrooms. I don't think it worked all that well because I remember some sort of small heaters in each of the bedrooms. Somebody told be they put hot rocks in them as they had no fuel source.

OK, it's not old by back-east standards, but my great-grandparent's homestead (built in 1937) was heated with a wood furnace. Apparently it was one of the first (at least in this area). Ducting is still intact as far as I can tell. Would love to restore the place one day, but that would be oodles of $$$ that I don't have right now. At least it has a new roof (courtesy of the rest of the family), so hope remains.

1797 vintage, fireplaces in each of the non-basement rooms (8), and then at some later point thimbles in every one of those rooms. A relative of the prior owners, who were here 30 years, said a freestanding stove was kept running in each of the 4 downstairs rooms. He said that often wood supply would get low in the winter and they would harness up the team and get some fresh wood. The farmer's wife told us she used to serve the firemen coffee while they waited for chimney fires to burn out.

Our house is a 2500 sqft Victorian with 42+ windows, and I believe was built around the mid 19th century, with 10' ceilings. I'm pretty sure there were 4 chimneys in the house, 2 that were upstairs to heat the rooms. Based on their cleanliness, I'm sure they burned coal. In the 60's when my grandparents bought the home, it wasn't insulated. There were 2-150,000+ btu fuel oil furnaces. One upstairs and one down. From what I've been told, in the 70's the fuel bill was over 400.00 a month. In 79 the house was insulated with ureaformaldyhyde foam, which cut things in about half but then shrank over the years. Fast forward to now, after a lot of money and work we heat with a little 3.5 cuft wood furnace.

This year was the first year we met our match though. Since installing the new furnace we have used zero propane for the last 4 seasons. Here just a couple of days ago, our area hit -16 temps with -50 windchills. We were keeping up with wood, but sometime during the night it wasn't enough. When I woke at 4:00 am it was 65 from the woodfurnace, and I kicked on the central furnace for the first time this year. It kinda bums me out, but I know we just don't have the heating capacity for those temps. If we had no wind, I think we would have been fine.

People look at our home and always make comments about how hard it is to heat. They are shocked when they hear how easy it is to heat. It's amazing to think about from the start, multiple stoves or fireplaces, then years later a huge gravity wood/coal furnace (50's-early 60's), to now the little 3.5 cu ft firebox. Many times we've seen 69-71 overnight in the mid teens after a 9-10 hour period.

I know I don't compare but i like your post so I am joining in. I have a 1943 built colonial, no insulation, lots of windows and a crazy wind that can rip through the main living area. A slate roof and two exterior brick fireplaces with some really nice woodwork and stained glass leaded widows in the house. There was a godin coal stove when we bought it 20 years ago but the town said it had to be ripped out to get the co. I have a tank strapped to a storage room ceiling in the basement, looks like it was for some sort of heating, it only looks like 20-30 gallons worth, kind of weird. Also have a really nice brick outdoor fireplace.... So this house has some nice history, not as much as yours but we absolutely love our house, except we had a pipe bust today because of the way the house was built(pipes in a concrete crawl space) and I could use another bedroom now that the kids are getting older and the girls share a room.....but nice thread

My Victorian farm house built in 1899 has a thimble in all the downstairs rooms 5 . There were small coal stoves in those rooms. Like yours Joful there was a summer kitchen destroyed by fire 60 years ago. I've completely renovated the house. I took the wood stove out of the kitchen and never saw the coal stoves. Heat rose to heat the 5 rooms on the second floor. Just one Jotul heating most of the house now. Just me and the wife left. 4 bedrooms have the doors shut to save heat. I'm sure house must really be nice. Love the real old homes.

Paulywalnut said:

My Victorian farm house built in 1899 has a thimble in all the downstairs rooms 5 . There were small coal stoves in those rooms. Like yours Joful there was a summer kitchen destroyed by fire 60 years ago. I've completely renovated the house. I took the wood stove out of the kitchen and never saw the coal stoves. Heat rose to heat the 5 rooms on the second floor. Just one Jotul heating most of the house now. Just me and the wife left. 4 bedrooms have the doors shut to save heat. I'm sure house must really be nice. Love the real old homes.

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His house s a beauty, I've seen 2 pics or so of it, maybe he will show some more?

Ram 1500 with an axe... said:

I have a tank strapped to a storage room ceiling in the basement, looks like it was for some sort of heating, it only looks like 20-30 gallons worth, kind of weird.

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Sounds like an expansion tank.

Ours is a 1815 Federal. There is/was a fireplace in every room. Plus a bake oven in the each end of the basement.
The basement was setup with a central external coal shute and the house was heated by coal until the oil hot water system was fitted by the 3rd family in the 1930s.

The early owners didn't worry too much as they had servants who literally did the dirty work of moving the coal around.
All of the old chimneys are still here. Where the chimneys have been moved in the roof, the bricks are still thick black with carbon.
How they didn't have serial chimney fires is a mystery to me.

One of the previous owners had the idea of filling all the unused chimneys with straw bales.
We discovered this when trying to put in the SS liner for our pellet stove.
There was circa 14 feet column of straw to clear so we could get the 4" pipe up the chimney.

Our house was originally built in the early 1860's and has been added onto a few times. You can still see the old half log beams under the kitchen and dining room. Parts of the house sag something fierce, but it will all be fixed. It will take some work holding up the second floor while we rebuild the first floor and then readjust everything so the second floor is still straight. The second floor was built after the house was sagging, so it will be fun. There is one chimney going up through the center of the house, but it is used for the propane water heater now. We are going to put it back into service with our Kitchen Queen cookstove. My wife's parents added a short (<10 feet) chimney on the OUTSIDE of the south wall of the living room and put a Lopi Answer on it. That is what we are using for heat now. It works, but the lopi has to run wide open when it gets real cold outside.

Our house has been in my family since its beginning. The oldest portion of the house was built in the 1850's and the large portion of the house was added on in 1906.The old portion of the house consists of what used to be the main house now our kitchen and a summer kitchen, both of witch have a thimble in the wall but the original chimneys have been torn down below the roof line and roofed over. When the newer part of the house was built they installed a coal furnace which was later retro-fitted to burn gas. I can remember the behemoth of a furnace in the basement which was completely replaced in the early eighties. The summer kitchen still has the original windows.

Our house (the Cottage) isn't old be house enthusist standards (although many general home buyers think of 1950's as "old")...but originally there wasn't any heat, lol. Well, maybe a moniter type heater, the cottage a couple doors down that hadn't been updated much had one. At some point someone put in a boiler and baseboard heat.

Our Old House...that was a weird one. We never did figure it out. It was a small (850ish) sq ft vernacular (picture the house every kid draws-rectangle with a triangle on top) built in the early 1920's. When we bought it there was a (nat. gas DV) wall heater up stairs and an in floor gravity heater down. NO ducting/plumbing/evidence of either, so no central heat ever. A neighbor that lived there his whole life told us a PO had removed a brick chimney that had been in the middle of the house...from the bottom up (doh). Weirdly, there was no foundation for it under the house and we couldn't find where it had gone up through the roof, although the bedroom floor did have a square patch in it. He also had a couple old pics of the house, and one does look like there's a small central chimney. The house had been reconfigured when we bought it so we aren't completely sure but it appears that there MIGHT have been a wood cook stove in the kitchen which used the chimney. the neighbor didn't recall. his house was heated with coal, although when he had passed and it was cleared out, we never could figure out where the coal stove was. Interestingly, our old garage seemed to have a coal crib, but it might have been a feed crib since they did have horses there at one point. It didn't have coal dust built up-the neighbor's garage had a coal crib and there WAS dust built up.

We looked at a couple of early 1800's homes here, and both had no evidence of stoves. One was amazing, a brick vernacular farm home that was built by someone with money with a capitol M. I am quite sure it didn't have stoves or fireplaces, as there was no space for a walled up fireplace or walls thick enough to hide a roofed over chimney and all of the original mouldings were intact. It was heated by very decorative radiators. The other was a mid 1800's cobblestone which also didn't seem to have evidence of hidden fireplaces, but it was no where near as high end so they might just have been remodeled away. It did belong to/was buiilt by the founder of the town though, so perhaps they didn't go all out of trimwork but still went with high end heating. Sadly, the brick vernacular has suffered through a few not so historically oriented owners and has either been sold again or is going REO and the cobblestone has been vacant for several years (it was owned by a great older gentleman when we looked at it, he was intending to move to CA where his daughter lived after it sold so it could be an estate stuck in probate).

Edited because I forgot one "lost" heat source in our Old House. The gravity heater was vented into a cinder bloack chimney that ran up the side of the house. When we were doing some renos we found a "blocked off" (semi filled with a rough cut piece of drywall) round hole that must have been a thimble for something previous to the in floor heater. Assume it was gas fired, the chimney isn't built like any wood chimney I've seen, only like the old ones for pre-high efficiency furnaces.

Howdy Joful!


I know we have discussed this before, but I dont think inthe 18th and 19th century they even tried to keep the entire house warm, only the space in use at any given time. Which in the colonial era meant that during the day probably just the kitchen and maybe a parlor was heated by the fireplace there, and then in the evening they might light some bedroom fireplaces to warm up bedwarmers, before bundling up under a lot of blankets for the night. Having lots of smaller rooms with low ceilings and interior doors made it easier to partion off and heat only the used space..... which is why you didn't see "open concept" till the era of cheap energy.

In our house, which is transitional period like yours, we have fireplaces in the front two rooms, a cooking hearth in the ell where the modern woodstove is, and I have also found a concreted in stove thimble on the back side of the cooking hearth chimney in the area that's now our kitchen. Might have been a summer kitchen or storage shed space originally. On the second floor there is nothing at all, as was common for cape cod style houses which back then where working class homes and the second floor was unfinished attic space where the children or boarders might all have slept many to a bed bundled up under lots of blankets with no heat at all.

eclecticcottage said:

We looked at a couple of early 1800's homes here, and both had no evidence of stoves. One was amazing, a brick vernacular farm home that was built by someone with money with a capitol M. I am quite sure it didn't have stoves or fireplaces, as there was no space for a walled up fireplace or walls thick enough to hide a roofed over chimney and all of the original mouldings were intact. It was heated by very decorative radiators. The other was a mid 1800's cobblestone which also didn't seem to have evidence of hidden fireplaces, but it was no where near as high end so they might just have been remodeled away. It did belong to/was buiilt by the founder of the town though, so perhaps they didn't go all out of trimwork but still went with high end heating. Sadly, the brick vernacular has suffered through a few not so historically oriented owners and has either been sold again or is going REO and the cobblestone has been vacant for several years (it was owned by a great older gentleman when we looked at it, he was intending to move to CA where his daughter lived after it sold so it could be an estate stuck in probate).

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Could well be they had central heat. There are patents for both early steam and gravity hot water radiant systems going all the way back to the 1830s/1840s. One of the earliest reliable systems was Golds Patent 'Mattress' Radiator which was introduced a few years before the Civil War.


And we know that graivty hot air central heat goes back as far as ancient Rome....

eclecticcottage said:

Sounds like an expansion tank.

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Mine was still being used when I moved in here but it was leaking. I finally figured out it was the rusty tank that was causing me to constantly have to bleed the radiators.

There's also a patched hole in the living room floor (center of house) from the central heater. I just happen to know it was coal despite having never seen it but remember my grandfather trying to convince us the roaring coming up from the 3x4 floor grate was a monster in the basement. Often when a home was heated with coal there's still evidence from the damage the coal chute would do gaining access to dump several tons of coal into the basement. All the basement windwos here have been replaced such that all the evidence is gone, but the house next door still has the damaged window trim. I remember the coal boiler being removed from that house and eventually all the tall cast iron steam radiators.

Yup, and in old gravity hot water systems those expansion tanks where often in the attic....


More fun old reading from heatinghelp: http://www.heatinghelp.com/files/articles/1223/79.pdf

I've always wondered what the stoves looked like back in the day in the 1700's, I had always assumed they just burnt with wood fireplaces only.

My 2 story, 1500sqft colonial was built in 1899 and I've always wondered how they heated it. There is one chimney but no fireplace. The house has steam heat on the first floor so I can only assume that they installed a coal fired boiler in the basement when the house was new. Kinda scary to think about because the masonry chimney is only 6"x6" and the wood framing goes right up to it.

I've done some remodeling on the upstairs and there is evidence of some patch jobs to the chimney in the two bedrooms that are on either side of the chimney. There is also evidence of a chimney fire or some soot escaping the chimney at some point. The wood framing abutting the 2nd floor ceiling near the chimney was black and so is the wood where it passes through the roof in the attic. It is physically sound and bleach, hydrogen peroxides, and other mold remover/surfactants did nothing to it. I think I have some pictures on here somewhere in my install thread.

If the patch jobs were not due to a chimney fire there might have been small kerosene or coal heaters in these rooms. The rooms are small so I can't imagine anything too large. Sounds scary.

There seems to be evidence of a wood cookstove in the kitchen as well. I think they vented out the wall and went up the side of the house.

The house i grew up in had a coal heatrola (warm air) in the living room and a small (johnny stove)in the basement for hot water. NO heat in the bedrooms. In the morning it was FREEZING in the bedrooms.