Community Chat

[Meowingkitty]

The few times we needed heat we had a gas furnace, now it's an electric heat pump.

[CatsyCline]

my parents purchased a home that was really built as a summer cottage and we had a kerosene furnace set in to the floor covered by an iron grate . can't tell you how often i raked my bare toes running across the grate.  yowch.  the bad thing is the kerosene fumes were noxious. i had bad bouts of bronchitis every winter as a kid.  bad to where the student teachers kept eyeing me as i hacked away in class.  one finally took me to the nurses' office and i was sent home. when i left home i never had bronchitis again for many many years.

[Carmie]

We had a coal furnace that had to be fed several times a day.  You also had to remove the ashes every day.  Heat from this furnance was gravity fed... Meaning hot air rose up through  12 X 14 holes in the floor covered by louvred brass grates.  My bedroom was on the third floor, so we had to keep the door open to get any heat.

A transom is a small window above a door... Usually bedroom.  You would open these transoms windows to let in the heat by unlocking a brass like pole and and pushing up on them.

i remember removing the brass grates from the floor to talk to my brother who was in the kitchen a floor below.  I forgot to put it back and accidently fell through the floor into the kitchen below.  I fell on to the kitchen table where my mother was folding clothing.  I was lucky I didn't get hurt.  I might have been 4-5 at the time.

[Eliana]

A wood stove similar to this:

We had a door at the bottom of the steps leading to upstairs, and we had to keep it closed to keep the heat downstairs during the daytime hours.  We could open it half an hour before bedtime to let some heat upstairs.  It was cold!

[bri20]

I've only lived in houses with gas heat.

I remember my mom telling me they had a coal heat when she was little.  The coal was kept in the basement.  The coal man had a chute or something where he delivered the coal. 

[drizzellla]

I grew up in the 50's. We had radiant gas heat through out the house. It did a nice job of keeping the house warm. In fact my Mom insisted that a window in my bedroom had to be open every night during "heating season". But since the furnace was in the basement, you had no idea when the heater was on. It was quiet because there was no need for a  fan. It was clean and required little maintenance.

When we were looking to buy a house I was so disappointed that more house didn't have a radiant heating system. In fact we did not run across any with radiant heat. My current house has hot air. 

[ROMARY]

As a child, we had steam radiators.  It was wonderful.  No noise, each room remained as warm as we wanted, using a side knob.   Nice and cozy, as I recall.   There was a 'boiler room' in the basement, all incased in thick concrete with a huge, heavy metal door.  We didn't have any problems for all of those years, thank goodness. 

[shoesnbags]

When I was a child in the 50s we lived in an old house that had space heaters in every room powered by natural gas, which was cheap and plentiful in the South. As someone else mentioned, every heater had a pipe going to it that supplied it with gas. So we were always nice and warm, but you had to be careful to have adequate ventilation. I remember how I loved to stand in front of the heater to warm up when I came in from outside. When I was a teenager in the. 60s, we moved to a brand new house with a gas furnace in the attic - a forced air system, which is still what's used in most houses around here. 

[Reba055]

All I ever remember is central heat and air, thank goodness. I do believe they used something different when I was very little, but I honestly don't know what. 

[Mominohio]

When I was really little, my folks had a house with a fuel oil furnace.

But most of my growing up years, it was natural gas, forced air furnaces.

By the time I was born, most coal furnaces had been replaced in our part of the country, but my mom remembered them from her childhood.

Many of the kids we grew up with had radiators in their home, and that was the warmest, nicest heat I've ever experienced. Those were heated by coal furnaces back in the day, but when I was a kid, everyone had converted to gas burners for the water heating that warmed these radiators.