Heating Our Houses

For some reason I have a desire to write about how my family homes were heated. So I thought it would make for an interesting essay. I was born in a house, perhaps an apartment, that my parents rented at 401 Congress Street in Schenectady, New York. In July 2014 I visited that address only to find the house had been demolished. Therefore, given that I was born in 1929 I would guess that the Congress Street house probably was heated by either a potbelly heater and kitchen stove, or centralsteam heat. This what a potbelly furnace looks like. It rested on a metal floor plate and was usually located in the most central part of the home. I remember visiting relatives whose home had these heaters. The next house I gew up in was on Crane Street, also in Schenectady, where my sister Louise was born in 1932. It was a second story apartment in a building of which the first floor was the combination residence and Real Estate office of Bengiamin Gallo, a cousin of my father whom we affectionally called Uncle Benny. This location on Crane Street was a more modern section of Schenectady called Mont Pleasant. I'm guessing again that the house on Crane Street was heated by steam heat because I don't remember any Potbelly furnace. It could have been heated by a hot-air central system, but I don't remember any hot-air registers. When the steam radiator started heating up and reached operating temerature the relief valve shown on the right would "pop-off" and start to whistle. It would be music of sorts when all radiators started popping off in the morning. You never forget. This image is a close image of the kitchen stove in the Crane Street apartment. How well I remember standing close to the stove getting warm on a cold winter morning. These type stoves either were wood or coal burning or oil burning. I don't remember wood or coal being used in Crane Street stove so I assume it was coal oil burning. Regardless, it worked! Some short time after Louise was born, my father purchased a 2-story house at 1234 Main Street just a few blocks from the Crane Street apartment. We lived on the second floor. 1234 Main Street was heated by steam heat, the steam generated by a coal furnace in the basement. This what the furnace looked like except the one shown has an electric blower to increase the fire's temperature. We didn't have that. As best I remember, the kichen stove on Main Street was gas-burning. It was a bit more streamlinned like this image. The top folded back accordian-style. My father was a General Electric emplyee so I imagine the 1234 Main Street stove was purchased at the GE store. The same store where our GE radiator-top refrigerator was purchased. I'm still trying to find a more accurate GE image of them both. Some stoves had grates on the top so that the stove could also be used for heating the kitchen from the oven heat. Ours didn't. My father tended to the coal furnace in the basement but I would often accompany him when he "stocked" the fire in the evening. It was a "man thing." Never in the morning as I would still be sleeping by the time he left for work for his 7:30 A. M. shift. The coal ash was collected from the ash bin of the furnace and placed in metal "Ash Cans" which were picked up by "Ash Men." The city ash collectors would go down into the cellar of the house through the "Cellar Door" and attend to disposing the ash in city trucks after which they would replace the empty ash cans back in the cellar. Image that today! Our cellar had a coal bin as all homes did that used coal for heating. The first improvement my parents made was an automatic electric system that carried the coal from the coal bin by use of an auger. When the thermostat was increased in the morning, the system would calibrate how much more coal was needed by the temperature in the furnace hotbox and auger that amount of coal to the furnace. The system worked better than the totally manual system but the ash still needed disposing of. My parents decided they wanted a somewhat larger home so they sold the 1234 Main Street house and purchased a 2-story house at 1260 Main Street - a few houses up the block. The heating sytem for the 1260 house was also steam heated. Water was heated to steam by the coal fired furnace in the cellar and piped to steam radiators. The same attendance to the coal furnace was required a fact that my father got tired of it. So my parents immediately converted the furnace to fuel oil. A oil tank was placed in the basement and the coal bin removed. The second story of 1260 Main Street was rented and my parents also converted that heating system to oil rather than coal. After I left home and lived away, my parents purchase a really nice brick suburban home. My father was so proud of it including the fact that it was hot-water heated. Hot water was circulated through radiators that are smaller and the heat in the home is ambiant meaning one never feels that the heat has come "on" or gone "off." Plus the basement is very clean. This is an example of a hot-water furnace. As my parents got older they moved back into Schenectady and the last house they ever lived in had the same type hot-water heat. The fuel in this last home was natural gas.