So how cold was it indoors in days of yore?

Factual Questions
1

What with $3.00 heating oil, my being kind of cheap, and the outside temperature hovering in the single digits, my living room is currently at 58 degrees. Which is tolerable if not ideal, particularly if I’m moving about.

So…it has me wondering. In days of yore, before electricity and central heating, what would the normal person have considered a comfortable indoor temperature during the winter?

Did they keep the woodstoves roaring, or just enough to keep from freezing to death?
How did this differ from, say, Colonial New England to Victorian England to mid-1800’s Boston?

I’m guessing bedrooms were not heated at all (or with just a small fireplace), but how about the main living quarters?

2

I’ll answer based on living through the winter in a large Victorian farmhouse in rural Ireland in the 1990s:

Bloody cold.

My ex’s parents’ house was built in the 1860s or '70s, and had a peat-burning fireplace in the living room, and a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. None of the rest of the house was heated or insulated. In the 1960s they’d put in central radiator heating with a “back boiler” that was supposed to be heated by the fireplace in the living room, but it didn’t work, so the house was climatically as it was when it was built.

The living room was cold or scorching, depending on how far you were from the fire. The kitchen was tolerable, and we spent most of our time in there. Everone wore thick sweaters in the house, and big woolly socks.

In one or two of the bedrooms there were tiny disused fireplaces, that I suppose would have been lit and maintained when there were domestic servants around, so it might have been slightly more pleasant back then, though they wouldn’t have packed much punch, but the rest of the house was pretty much the same temperature as outdoors. It had that “chilled masonry” feel you get in unoccupied buildings.

(There was no point in electric heaters, as the drafts from the windows and lack of insulation meant they had little effect. We had electric blankets on the beds, wore clothes to bed, and on colder nights this included gloves and hats. I would wake in the middle of the night with my body mostly warm, but the tip of my nose freezing.)

You get used to it - her family never complained about the temperature - and if you’ve grown up with it, I’m sure you would only vaguely know what you’re missing.

3

I lived in an apartment with electric heat that I paid for. During a bad winter I literally did not have the money to pay for the heat. The temperature in my place was around 55 in the daytime with the sun coming in and around 40 at night. There were mornings when I woke up and saw my breath.

The outside temperature was around 20-35 degrees at the time.

4

I lived in a house like that once - the fire put out a fair bit of radiant heat, but didn’t really warm the air in the room - so you would be blistering hot on the side nearest the fire and frostbitten on the other.

5

Missed the edit window, but wanted to add that, due to the temperatures involved in getting out of bed and going to the bathroom in the middle of the night in that house, my ex’s mother still uses a chamber-pot. She’s not a yokel or anything - she’s a lecturer in IT. Needs must when your butt is cold…

6

I’ve a good friend who lives in a home built in 1717. The entire home is built around an enormous hearth. He and his wife have fires just about every day [infact I drove by his house this morning [5 degrees here in CT] and there was smoke coming from the chimney. Basically, what Mangetout where proximity to the fire determines how warm you will be.

On their old home the hearth - when roaring - throws a lot of heat, and because they had the windows redone a few years back they do not have a very drafty home so the hearth can warm them quite nicely. When upstairs in the rooms without a fireplace, and where the chimny goes through the warm stone from the chimney puts off some heat.

But in all they have a very cold home.

7

I have a friend who lived in Japan for a year - not in Hokkaido or anything super-cold, but I’m not sure where. They don’t have a lot of insulation on houses there, or central heat, and he’d wake up in the morning after cold nights to find his breakfast banana frozen. He said the key was to find somebody to warm up with.

8

I heated with a wood stove for years and years. I’ve since replaced it with a propane stove. Like people said, it depends where you are in the house. We keep our bedroom cold, but we like it that way.

Anyway, It’s very common to stand by the stove for a minute or two to take the chill off. Especially when coming in from outdoors. I really, really miss that in a house that does not have a stove. I often feel like I just can’t get warm in a house with only central heat.

9

People wore a lot more layers back then than we do today. For example, men in Georgian and Regency England wore sleeved waistcoats under their jackets, which is something most people today can’t imagine. Waistcoats are a vest-like item for us. Once you figure in a full linen shirt and undertrousers, wool socks, essentially two wool jackets, wads of linen wrapped around your neck, and an indoor cap, you can trap a lot of heat.

They didn’t just wear smoking caps and jackets because they looked cool, but because they has the very practical benefit of keeping you warm.

10

I’m surprised by this, actually. Are wood stoves today better than wood stoves of yore? The weekend before Christmas, I took my son out for our annual Solstice vigil, and it was sleeting and raining and quite cold. Some people fired up the two small wood stoves in the uninsulated barn (just a huge aluminum sided box, really, with some disused appliances and “stuff” stored along the edges.) It was uncomfortably warm in there, even when I stripped off all my layers and hat and boots.

A friend of mine heats her modern Georgian suburban home with two woodstoves - one in the living room (main floor) and one in the finished basement. Even the bedrooms on the floor above the living room are often too warm for my taste, and she’s only ever got one log slowly smoldering at once in each stove. Of course, that building has modern insulation, so it doesn’t really count.

Our apartment was as warm back when it was built as it is now. Still runs off the same boiler/radiator system as it did in the early 20’s, only now it’s powered by a gas boiler instead of coal. No insulation, though. The temperature fluctuates wildly, from too hot to too cold, with brief Goldilocks’ moments of just right.

11

My house was built before 1760 in New England and it has fireplaces in all the main rooms including the bedrooms. They are the shallow variety good for cooking and deflecting heat. We don’t use ours out of fire concerns but I have it on good authority that they would establish say a winter sleeping room for the kids and they would all sleep on the beds or floor with a nice fire going. The fireplace size indicates that it could heat such a room easily. My in-laws have a circa 1790 farmhouse in New Hampshire where it gets even colder and the original main kitchen fireplace can more than heat several hundred square feet by itself. It may not have been that bad at night with a good supply of firewood.

12

Geeze. Makes me feel grateful to be able to get my place up to 64° overnight.

Now, if I may, I’d like to turn the discussion on its head and talk about TOO MUCH indoor heating (which is probably the only reason I CAN sleep in a 64° bedroom).

People complain about overheated indoor spaces in wintertime, but in New York they’re practically compulsory. I blame the collective unconscious, with its shared memory of banging on pipes and cussing out Supahs (the men who run apt houses).

The result is that the complainers - the slenderest, warmest-blooded, most vociferously bitchy female workers or residents - get the temp they like (somewhere north of 78°) and all others must sweat it out. In my building we get oodles of air-drying un-shut-offable steam heat - but in the daytime only, when the reptilian dowager population is awake and pottering.

In addition, the radiators are located in heavy-gauge steel and masonry window wells. Add in sunshine and you could coddle eggs on the sills.

As an overweight hairy male of partially Nordic lineage, I like a cool sleep space. But I also work from home, and there’s damn little I can do to keep comfy during the day short of indecent exposure.

13

Just a quick comment. Georgia doesn’t get days and days of below 0f temps.

My house usually does just fine with one stove. But about a week of below 0 and no sun and you start to feel it. It’s a passive solar house, with tons of windows. They can be a two edged sword. They let lot’s of heat in and out.

14

This is why you have curtains on the windows. :slight_smile:

The one major thing my friends who live in a passive-solar house would do differently is put large insulating curtains across all the windows. Because they have so many windows, this would be a significant cost. They can feel the difference between when their (sloping) windows are bare, and when the snow covers them.

But having a lot of thermal mass to store the heat in also makes a difference. Assuming you start off at room temperature, your house won’t cool down as quickly if it has lots of thermal mass.

15

Yep. I am going to get some window insulation someday. First I’m going to get better windows. My house was originaly ‘designed [on a napkin]’ to have 55 gallon drums of water in ‘closests’ with huge windows in them. This was the thermal mass. But it looked like shit, and I wanted more light inside. I have a concrete floor so I ripped out a few of the closest and now let the sun strike the floor. 13 4x8 windows way up in the Colorado rockies. If my house is anything, its sunny. :smiley:

16

No, no, no. Georgian the style, not Georgia the STATE! The house is in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago, where it gets nice and chilly!

Sorry for the confusion. :smack:

17

Having fireplaces doesn’t mean that people used them often: firewood (before coal) was labor intensive and slow to renew itself–it was a luxury item. My medieval history prof told me that peasants in medieval Germany would have had, at most, enough wood for cook fires: for cold German winter nights one relied on a small space and lots of collective body heat, including whatever animals were wintered over. Accounts of Charlemange’s vast wealth included how many wagons of firewood he burned in a day. It was a serious indulgence: even the households of lords involved everyone sleeping in the greathall during the winter, where there might be a single fire to contribute.

18

Actually, I think they are, although I don’t know any of the details.

I do know that in my somewhat-insulated-but-not-to-modern-standards Colonial house, a woodstove will keep one room comfortable and will somewhat warm the upstairs, but only if kept fed to the gills. “One smoldering log” just doesn’t cut it. Integrating the wood stove into the central heating system rather than relying on radiant heat and convection would be far more efficient.

19

I was talking to the grand-daughter of the family that used to own my house. It was built about 160 years ago. Tennessee, which doesn’t get really cold for long periods of time, but it was 6 degrees this morning. She said she remembers visiting her grandparents as a child and they still heated with the fireplaces in the house. She’d sleep between them with a big fire in the fireplace, and it was still cold and drafty.

I ran out of propane Monday. Being too cheap to pay $80 for an emergency delivery, they came yesterday. It was 36 in the house when I got up. That’s after I put $100’s in insulation in. But my bed has a heated mattress pad, a down comforter, 3 other blankets and cats. As long as I was in bed I was comfortable. Well, I also slept in sweats and put the hood of my hoody up.

StG

20

In Colonial New England times:

There is a diary entry dating from Colonial New England, which I am unfortunately unable to locate online, in which the diarist relates sitting in front of his roaring fire while apples in a bowl on the table in the center of the room freeze solid.

That’s how cold it was in the room.

Back rooms of the house were routinely simply closed off for the winter, and folks huddled around the rooms opening off the main chimney stack with its multiple fireplaces, and tolerated the 32 degree temperatures, and noted with interest the fact that the apples were freezing, because after all, what else could they do? It wasn’t a question of what temperature could you find “tolerable”, because no matter how much you stoked your pre-Count-Rumford fireplace, 90% of the heat it produced was still going straight up the chimney. And a roaring fire actually increases the draftiness in the room, because it requires so much oxygen that it pulls even more cold air in from under the doors and around the windows.

And even after iron woodstoves were invented, before the advent of modern insulation and a central heating system to send the warm air throughout the house, there’s a limit to how hot you can stoke a woodstove before you run the risk of setting the house on fire. Chimney fires were, and still are, a real risk.

So you just tolerated the cold, because you didn’t have any options. And you suffered from things like chilblains. And you amassed a collection of feather beds and comforters, which are superbly warm. And you went to bed when it got dark and the mercury plummeted, because it was warmer under the eiderdown than walking around in the house.

People also wore headgear indoors (think of those Puritan headdresses, and of nightcaps), since most of the body heat that’s lost is lost through the top of your head, your scalp being rich in blood vessels in order to act as a heat exchanger for your brain which evolved in the tropics. So you put on a hat, and you keep warmer.