Evolution Of My Heating Experience

Reader Contribution by Bruce Mcelmurray
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As I rolled out of bed this morning having realized that it felt pretty cool on that part of my body that wasn’t under the covers, I realized that the wood stove had gone out during the night. The dog’s needed to go out, and I needed some heat in the house that clearly wasn’t going to get any warmer unless a fire was started in the wood stove. Yikes, that floor is cold. So after the dogs had been taken care of it was time to clean out the wood stove and get a fire going. As I sat here drinking my coffee I reflected back on how things for me had now gone full circle when it came to heat.

When I was a child growing up in Central Michigan one of my responsibilities was getting a fire started in the coal stove first thing in the morning. I was a skinny kid that had to stand up twice to even cast a shadow but getting heat in the house was a priority even though my skinny body lacked any insulation. I would get up, get dressed, go down to the basement where we had a large coal furnace and clean out the ash drawer, crumple up some newspaper get it lit and shovel in some coal. That old furnace was coated in what I know now was asbestos but back then we had no idea it was bad for us. Once the fire was started and going good I would hop, skip across the cement floor and run upstairs to stand on the floor register to warm back up.

Then it was time to get cleaned up and head off to school or if it was a weekend do my paper route. By then the coal stove would be stoked up and the house nice and warm and I had to leave all that nice heat. We had our coal delivered, which I used to enjoy watching, as the truck would back down our driveway and run a chute from it to our basement window and the coal would go down that chute into the basement. Of course the coal dust would be on everything in the basement and for the next few days I would wear it every time I went down in the basement. I don’t recall that the snow outside was any way effected by the coal smoke and it seemed like a pretty efficient way to heat if you ask me. Nearly everyone back then in the city where I lived had coal furnaces with chimneys spewing smoke. Only the more wealthy had oil heat where they could just set a thermostat not have to start a fire every day.

Then when I was older and bought our first house in Tampa, Florida, it had an oil fired furnace, too. That worked well for heat and was less work than the old coal furnace I had grown up with. Those terrazzo floors would get cold in the winter and even though Florida is considered a tropical state, it can get very cold for short periods of time in the winter. From there subsequent houses all had thermostats and a central source of heat, like a heat pump that blew cold air out the heat ducts but still managed to warm the house up. I never figured that out and missed those days when I could stand on a floor register to warm up. When you are shivering there is nothing like a floor register to get you toasty warm again.

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