4 Forgotten Ways Your Ancestors Stayed Warm During Winter

A well designed home can do well with just one wood burner. The staircase to the up stairs and a couple well placed floor vents allowing convection from the lower level to the upper and back done can heat an entire house. It wont be furnace warm all throughout, but it will be quite survivable.

My great great grandfather moved to Hawaii from New England.

It worked. But it did get down to 68º a couple of weeks ago. So I lit a fire. Didn't need to. But it was nice.

I like our kitchen wood cookstove for heating and cooking better than the airtight fireplace I have in the basement.

You have to fill it more often than the airtight, but it keeps the house warm and cozy and I can cook at the same time. A single of wood to heat the house to seventy five for about fifteen hours a day takes about a single of wood in twenty days if the temperature is down to around five to ten below zero. The drawback is you got to put two small chunks of wood in every forty five minutes to an hour, which takes about two minutes when they are in the box in the dining room. The house doesn't drop below fifty in the remainder of the time. With fourteen hours of feeding it heats for about sixteen hours before the furnace comes back on set at sixty nine degrees.

I usually have four or five singles in stock at the beginning of the winter, but haven't even started it this year yet, trying out our new furnace to see how to gauge the fuel usage and efficiency. We will start to burn some wood in January, if I had a year in reserve, I would burn it all winter long part time...but right now I don't have a year ahead in advance. Next year I may buy a load of logs and cut and split it, ten full chords will last us probably five years the way we usually burn it, the gas furnace kicks in when the house cools down. In the fall, you start a fire for an hour, then let it go out and it keeps the house warm till evening, then start another fire and burn it an hour and it heats the house up so it stays decent all night. Might as well cook on the stove when you are using it, it costs no more to cook.

actually one better than a fireplace for heat is a pot belly stove .

it in a way is better because less heat goes up the chimney, you get 360 heating from it and you can put pots on top to cook/warm water (depending on the design)

they used to have some more barrel shaped and called quarter log pot belly stove where once you had some hot coals (from wood) you put in a quarter of a log and good.

I had one in the common area of a two story building at the FBO (fixed base operation) i worked at.
we put some wood in it and warm the whole room for hours with minimum wood and no electrical fan needed

pissed off the office on the second floor because the thermostat for the furnace that heated the office spaces was on first floor and the stove warmed that so the heat did not kick in

scrounger

bed warmers? the kind one would put hot coals in? then put it under the covers to heat the bed.
" From the 1500s until metal hot water bottles replaced them during the late 1800s, bed warmers - originally known as warming pans - were used to heat cold beds before families retired at night"

One of the biggest heat losers is windows.
I live in a 34 foot motor home and all my windows have 1 inch foam panels in them. They keep the heat inside during the winter and the heat out during the summer
The 32 inch tv i have keeps the room warm and i seldom turn on the propane heater.
I for a while lived in an old mining town in the sierras of Calif in an old two-story bunkhouse and I had the same foam panels set up in all the windows and in the winter we had 5+ foot of snow outside and just a wood burning stove and a little drip oil heater that ran on diesel fuel.
I kept a metal 10 gal tank of water on the oil heater that would steam into an outside condenser all night and in the morning i had hot water for what ever I needed it for and distilled water from for it cooking and drinking from the stove water still system.

originally posted by: caterpillage
A well designed home can do well with just one wood burner. The staircase to the up stairs and a couple well placed floor vents allowing convection from the lower level to the upper and back done can heat an entire house. It wont be furnace warm all throughout, but it will be quite survivable.

yes. i bought a house built in the 1930's, it had single pane wndows which i replaced with double pane vinal. took out 2 wndows and put in a 10'x5' in the dinning room. scared the hell out of me when they were cutting the space for it. thought the house would collapse it was2 story. it had a coal burner auto feed, 80,000 BTU an hour. we burned 3 ton a winter.
i had the upstairs redone with insulation for the ceiling and 2 ceiling fans for circulation. exposed the chimney that threw off nice heat. carpeted floor and stairway. i didn't insulate the floor so the heat could seep up both ways.
it kinda sucked when the coal delivery guy retired, i had to go and get a ton at a time to fill my bin over the summer.
probably took 5 yrs to load 16 tons what did i get? a divorce.

We have one of those potbelly fancy wood stoves with the glass door, holy cow, you get that thing going and it will sweat you out of the house. I try telling the wife it only needs a couple pieces of wood at a time, won’t listen. Have to go outside to cool off.
Has the option for a blower, don’t need it, heats up the house just fine.

originally posted by: Mizzazz22
Your home’s heating is an essential part of your survival in cold weather. Even if your house is insulated well, it will eventually get dangerously cold if your heating system is off or the power grid goes down.

Many homesteaders have fireplaces or wood-burning stoves in their homes, an idea that has plenty of merit, considering that wood has been the most common heating fuel throughout history.

On the plus side, wood is a renewable resource that one can harvest on their own. On the minus side, a fireplace or wood-burning stove is limited as to the area that it covers. You can’t heat an entire home with a fireplace.

Our ancestors solved this problem in a variety of ways — many of which we can adapt to our own use. Knowing what they did and why they did it gives us some insight into how to keep our own homes warm without electricity, even in the midst of a winter storm.

Read the rest of the article HERE

I remember our wood stove making the entire house too hot at times lol.

a reply to: MufflerTuesday

i have many a fond memories curling up with a girl in front of a wood fired stove in the middle of a cold NY night.

just have to watch out for fires in the chimney , but its easy to clean now with those cleaning logs you burn and all the creosote come out

i love fire, i save the branches and thinker logs from around the house and burn them in autumn

something very primal about fire

a reply to: penroc3

I live in upstate NY and regularly walk around in 20F weather with shorts and a hoodie on

Now that’s cold! I lived in upstate NY for a number of years. It makes Wisconsin look warm!
I remember going through a two week ice storm with no power.
My dad was a survivalist so it was a breeze for us. Just very boring!

This videoclip www.youtube.com... has some interesting ideas.

did i really just read an article that said what every father says?

"Put on a sweater"