stupid household inventions that should have been ditched long ago

In My Humble Opinion
1

As the maintenance team is here trying to figure out why we have no heat, I contemplate stupid household inventions and fixtures that persist long after better things are invented.
In this case, baseboard heaters. Of course, everyone wants to pile all their furniture and belongings in half of their room so that the room can be heated to a comfortable temperature. Every heater should be so delicate that merely bumping it can cause it to quit. Every room is best heated by having all the heat go straight up in front of the windows so that it disappears behind the curtains or gets neutralized by the cold seeping in. Everyone loves to try to sleep or watch and listen to entertainment while the heater ticks and clicks endlessly. Everyone wants to have to choose between sitting near the heat and blocking it or sitting far enough away that you can’t really feel it.

I also have no good feelings about swamp coolers and apartment complexes that lock you circuit breaker panel in your neighbor’s back yard.

Got any other suggestions for things that deserve a spot on the ash heap of historical household inventions?

2

Do you prefer old-fashioned radiators?

3

Doesn’t pretty much everyone prefer forced-air or under floor heating?

4

In general, probably, but hydronic baseboard heaters could be retrofitted where regular radiators are and electric ones can be added just about anywhere. Adding central air/heat is a much larger undertaking.

It should be noted that radiators (and vents from forced air furnaces) are usually put under windows on purpose, just for those reasons.

5

I have hydronic (hot water baseboard) heating in my house and it’s the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. Way too complicated to be reliable. In fact, right now the system is out of order while I wait for parts. Good thing we installed a ductless heat pump a couple years ago, or I’d be pretty darned cold right now.

6

The house where I grew up and my parents still live has an oil-powered forced air furnace. The problem I find is that the air gets very dry in winter, so no I don’t prefer this. My preference is for radiant floor heating, particularly if there’s ceramic tile in the kitchen or bathroom. (Going to the bathroom in the middle of the night when the floor is chilly is unpleasant.)

7

The way he mentioned the clicking, I assumed he was talking about a radiant heat. And my assumption is that baseboard radiators were developed as an improvement over having a big old metal radiator standing in each room.

I’ve spoken w/ several people who prefer radiators. Maybe they are just putting the best face on what they have, but I’ve encountered them. I’ve never lived anywhere where under floor heating was at all common other than in isolated rooms - mostly bathrooms.

8

I got it all. Hot water in floor heat, electric in floor heat, electric baseboard and propane stove.

The stove is our primary heat source and I love it.

In floor heat is of course great. We used to heat solely with wood, that got old.

9

I have baseboard water heating. It’s actually far more comfortable than forced air heating. The heat doesn’t go behind the curtains and out the windows, at least not in my house. Since the cold is coming from the perimeter of the house, having the heat come from the perimeter of the house means you have less of a temperature gradient through the house. As was already mentioned, you don’t have the problem of the air being dried out like you have with forced air.

We place our furniture pretty much wherever we want. Your comment about placing furniture in half of the room doesn’t match up with our reality. The entire room is comfortable, so no one sits near the heat. In my experience that is only an issue with old fashioned steam radiators.

It does tick and click. I’ll concede that point. But that ticking and clicking isn’t very loud, and in all honesty, I rarely even notice it. It’s not loud enough to interfere with our entertainment watching. Like I said, I rarely notice it, especially when we are watching TV. It’s not like forced air is 100 percent silent either.

The heaters aren’t delicate. I have no idea what you are referring to about bumping them. You’d have to attack ours with a hammer to make them stop working, and at that point you’d have a major water leak on your hands.

The system I have isn’t complicated. The furnace is pretty much the same level of complexity as a forced air furnace. Instead of a blower motor we have a circulating pump. There is an additional mechanism to automatically remove air from the system, for which there is no equivalent on a forced air system, but that’s it. Our system has been extremely reliable. Like anything else, YMMV. Some brands are more reliable than others. We have a good one.

I have never had a house with under floor heating. It’s not common around here, though I imagine it would be fairly comfortable. I very much prefer baseboard water heat to forced air, though. And heat pumps are garbage, IMHO. The only good thing you can say about them is that they’ll save you money. I’d rather spend the money and be more comfortable.

One bonus is that our furnace also provides our home’s hot water. We don’t have a water tank. It doesn’t matter how long of a shower anyone takes. We never run out of hot water. We could literally run the shower 24 / 7 / 365 and never run out of hot water (until I went broke from not being able to pay the water bill and they’d shut the water off).

Baseboard water heat is definitely not something that should be tossed onto the ash heap, IMHO.

Steam radiators, on the other hand, are something that I am more than willing to toss on the pile.

10

two things I don’t like. Having to go through the master bath to get to the closet seems to be the norm now. I’d much rather have two separate rooms even if it means two doors versus one and therefore less wall space. Also a lot of master baths now have the light switch in the room not the bath. I see no benefit to it.

11

I have oil/hot water heat with radiators all under windows. It works just fine. The boiler originally was designed to handle coal and is about 70 years old. I ask every year whether it should be replaced and the oil guy says it’s in great shape and anything I replace it with won’t be as sturdy.

12

How many of those people have old houses where the radiators have probably been there since the house was built? If someone buys and old house, especially if it’s because it’s old, they likely prefer the look of radiators. In college I live in a house that was built in 1890. While it had forced air heat, radiators would have looked great.

I’ll take your word for it. I’m guessing it varies from house to house, just like some people have a forced air heat and never have a single issue with it while other people have issues with it the entire time they own it.

That seems like it’s more about what the builders prefer as well as the size of the house.
The house I grew up in, a 3br/1.5 bath/2 story house, the full bath (not really a ‘master’ since it wasn’t part of the master bedroom) had a large linen closet in the bathroom. On the one hand, it’s nice since everything you need is right there. OTOH, if someone else needs to grab something, with 6 people in the house, they’re typically waiting for someone to finish up before they can go in.
The house I live in now 3br/1.5 bath/1 story, has a linen closet in the hallway. Not a big deal, but it’s also very small, maybe 1.5sqft.

As for the light switch, I see them outside the bathroom once in a while, usually in older houses. IIRC, at one point code required it to be outside to make sure you couldn’t futz with it with wet hands. Are there outlets in there?
FWIW, if the location of the light switch would be a good spot if it were turned around and inside the bathroom, it’s trivial to move it. Repairing the drywall would take longer than moving it into the bathroom.

13

The Swamp Cooler is a source of never-ending consternation. But the theory is solid.

14

Swamp coolers are great in a low humidity environment. Where I live, they’re just a noisy, useless fart machine.

I grew up in a house that was heated by the old fashioned natural gas heaters that squatted in the room like a fiery golem. Plenty of heat produced but of course, no ducts to carry it through the house. No thermostat either. If you wanted to adjust the heat produced then you open or closed the gas valve.

I would happily trade my frost-bitten left hand for one of those heaters installed in my basement now.

My natural gas fuel central heat has been down since Saturday morning and it currently 17 degrees F outside right now. It was Monday evening before I could even get a tech to look at it. It took him five minutes to determine that the circuit board has failed and they couldn’t get a replacement part until Wednesday. Yay Technology!

Those old heaters certainly were not the most efficient, comfortable or even safest option but frigemall, they WORKED!

15

Ceiling fans. What a waste of a good idea. Hard to install, hard to use, hardest to clean. Hate 'em.

16

Actually, I think most of the comments have been along the lines of the heat being “more comfortable” or something. I would have said that they thought water heat “less dry”, but earlier this winter I was w/ 4 people who were complaining about how dry their homes were. (All musicians, so concerned about their instruments in low humidity.) I said something like, “Just adjust the humidifier.” Turned out I was the only 1 of 5 who had forced air heat. All of the other 4 had radiant heat, so no whole-system humidifiers. So I dunno how “comfortable” radiant heat actually is - at least WRT dryness.

17

I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for but I’d vote CARPET!

Carpet grosses me out. One of the best days of my life was the day we ripped out the carpet. It has got to be the dirtiest thing in a house. I keep a pretty clean house but as clean as carpet might seem it never really is. First, there’s the puppy/dog puke, pee, and poop. Of course, all of that is immediately cleaned up but all that stuff soaks in and you never really get it all. Then there’s mud/dirt, sweaty feet, dust, spilled stuff… I remember all of the times I “cleaned” the carpet. I would get endless buckets of dirty black swill water. When we ripped our carpet up you could see the watermarks on the back side where things had been spilled or puked up or maybe from the cleaner used. There were even spots of mildew here and there on the back side probably from all of the times I steam cleaned it and it didn’t dry properly. Carpet is so unsanitary.

The owners previous to us had covered the original wood floors (in excellent condition from 1936) with crummy beige carpet. So now we have the original hardwood floors, the kitchen has ceramic tile and the addition has laminate wood floors. I would never go back to carpet.

18

The 100 year old, 200 lb cast iron radiator in my bathroom sometimes makes a bunch of noise. For whatever reason, once the weather starts to warm up in the spring, the pipes expand and contract in such a way that the circulator motor (pump) resonates into the bathroom radiator and it sounds like a diesel garbage truck is idling in there. I tried bleeding it, loosening and retightening some of the pipes, even cutting off the radiator completely but still noisy. The best solution so far? An empty shampoo bottle jammed between the radiator and the wall flexes things just enough to silence the truck in the bathroom.

19

Nope, sorry, gotta have my ceiling fans. They more than pay for themselves in reduced heating/cooling cost by circulating air. Hard to install? It takes me about 30 minutes to assemble and install a fan, maybe an hour if I’m putting it in a location where there was no previous overhead light, and I’m just a home DIYer. Hard to use? Most of mine are operated by remote control. The most difficult requires pulling a chain. Cleaning the blades can be a chore if the dust gets built up, especially if the fan is mounted high. I’ll take that trade-off, though.

My contribution to the scrap heap is bi-fold doors. No advantage over regular french doors, but have the added pain points of coming off track/getting misaligned. They gotta go!

20

I love carpet. I acknowledge having hard floors in a door entrance area, kitchen, dining room, and bathrooms. That eliminates 99% of spills and liquids. Oh yea don’t forget that if you leave any water on hardwood, it will ruin it!

Carpet is actually nice to walk on. We have hardwood in our house and I hate it. It is loud*, creaky as you walk, dirty**, scratches easily***.

My wife says she loves hardwood, but over the years we keep buying rugs to put everywhere because tile and hardwood is so dang unpleasant to stand on.

  • toys + hardwood = loud

** Because you have to sweep and then mop it (mopping is terrible). Since it is like three times harder to clean than carpet it never gets done often enough. Not to mention the cracks between the boards capture gunk and keep it for all eternity.

*** Did i mention the toys?