Santa Rosa weather usually gives no reason for complaint, so the recent cold snap, where thermometers struggled to climb much beyond freezing even in afternoons, came as an unwelcome surprise. When it's this frigid, Comstock House can seem like a big old barn of a place that sucks in the chill - or, it can be reasonably warm, even comfortable. It all depends on how well you understand the house's systems, and how willing you are to work with those systems instead of fighting them.
Most everything about this house was designed for the comfort of the Oates family in 1905, and the first step to living happily in this old house is embracing their standards of comfort. Not every corner of every room can be brightly lit in the evenings as many people today desire (more about that above), and some bedrooms will be warmer than others because they have larger radiators.
And you can also forget the gratification of instant warmth on a chilly morning by jacking up the thermostat; the hydronic radiators can take more than an hour to make the slightest difference if they started cold. The Oates family likely either ordered a servant to fix the fire in the cast-iron boiler several hours before they arose on a winter's morning, or left coals burning overnight so the radiators never cooled. The former owner of this house chose to use a timer that kicked the boiler alive before dawn (she was apparently not bothered by the hammering that results as hot water begins flowing through stone-cold iron pipes, and unworried that the shock of doing same every day might crack the century-old plumbing). We instead are setting the thermostat low overnight, but never turn it off completely - the equivalent of letting the coals die down.
But when the weather turns this extreme, no radiator management is enough to keep our house comfortable; somehow the main source of the seeping cold must be also blocked off, and here that means closing down all of the servant's portion of the house, including the kitchen.
Architect Brainerd Jones may have tended well to the comforts of the Oates family, but his disregard for the people who worked for them was deplorable. In the blueprints there was only a single toilet for the help, and it was accessed via a nook on the kitchen porch. The only radiator in that entire section of the house was specified for the upstairs servant's bedroom, and it's the tiniest radiator in the whole place. Mercifully, the contractor varied from the plans by adding another radiator to the "sitting room" (which we believe was more likely the cook's bedroom) and installing a toilet in the second upstairs bathroom.
The lack of radiators aside, Jones' design is also much of the reason why this northwest corner of the house turns arctic. The sitting room juts away from the house, exposed on three sides; the kitchen and hallway wrap around the back porch, which has no basement underneath it or second story above it to help insulate (no second floor above the sitting room, either).
In the Oates' day, only if the poor servant(s) kept the stove red hot all day could these rooms be usable, but the family probably rarely experienced their employees' discomfort. Every path into the kitchen/sitting room has a pair of doors that can be closed to buffer smells and cold from the main portion of the house. The most obvious pair are the swinging doors on either side of the china pantry, which allows it to function as a kind of airlock.
Today, the design allows us to zone off the old servant's portion of the house, which means that there is about 7,000 cubic feet less for the radiators to heat. While the results aren't perfect, it makes a noticeable difference. On a recent night where temps plunged to 22 degrees and only slightly edged past the freezing point by noon, it was a tolerably-comfortable 65 in the main part of the house, while in the zoned-off section it was 42 degrees.
Obl. history sidebar: The original post about our heating system neglected to mention that most homes built in that era didn't have radiators and hot-water heating, but instead used a gravity furnace. Here warm air from a coal-fired furnace positioned in the center of the basement drifted upwards through ducts (wrapped in asbestos, natch) to registers in the floors or baseboards. Besides being ridiculously inefficient, the furnaces were labor-intensive because they needed to be kept as hot as possible, requiring frequent trips down to the dungeon to "fix the fire."
it wasn't until after WWI that the first furnace blowers became available to force the air upwards using a propeller-like fan, and about the same time oil burners began to replace coal fires. The switchover to heating oil was encouraged because of war-related coal shortages that led to a "coalless Monday" order that lasted into 1918. Unlike coal - which was needed to fuel transatlantic ships - there was no rationing of oil whatsoever.
(BELOW: Cartoon from the November 3, 1907 Press Democrat. CLICK to enlarge)
Besides the fireplaces, Comstock House has a radiator in every room except for the kitchen and servant's bath. (The servant's bedroom also has the tiniest one, so any cynical observations about the Oates' disregard for employee welfare may well apply.) The system works, but takes hours to raise the ambient temperature into the comfort zone after it has gone cold. Left on constantly during winter and regulated by the thermostat, it keeps the house quite comfy if some rooms are also blocked off - see the posting on zone heating for more on that.
The radiators are heated with circulating water, not steam. Called "hydronic heating" today and popular in radiant systems for baseboards and floors, it was simply "hot-water heating" at the turn of the century, and a better alternative to steam in private homes. Although it takes longer to warm the cast-iron Victorian/Edwardian radiators with hot water, residents are spared the infamous knocking and banging in the pipes, not to mention the safety risks of pressurized steam.
A third option existed in 1905: Just invented a few years before was the "gas-steam" radiator, which was fundamentally an uninsulated water heater. Here a gas pipe feeds a small burner built into the radiator itself. It had the advantage of being the most efficent system because the radiator itself was the boiler; no need for hot water or steam to travel all the way from the basement. The drawbacks were that it had to be manually filled with water, and there was always risk of the flame blowing out, being so close to a drafty floor. Still, they were a popular choice for the day; in the 1904 Press Democrat, the Santa Rosa Lighting Company ran ads encouraging the public to "Ask to see the latest in gas heating, 'A GasSteam Radiator.'"
The hydronic system (technically: a two-pipe direct return water loop) in Comstock House has four basic components: The boiler in the basement to heat the water (Comstock House had a not-so-venerable WWII vintage "Petroheat" converted from oil to natural gas in 1956); An electric circulator pump to push the hot water upwards three stories; The cast-iron radiators; and an expansion tank in the attic intended to hold the water overflow when the system's at full throttle (although we've never seen much more than a liter in the tank).
For details on the system, the Brainerd Jones contract disappoints. On page 23 of the contract specs the architect writes only, "The heater, boiler, pipes, etc. will be provided for under separate contract." Sadly, that document is lost.
Although no trademark or patent numbers can be found on these radiators, they are almost certainly the "Rococo" model two-column (shown above) made by the American Radiator Co. By 1904, the company had a well-deserved reputation for making the finest radiators and residential boilers in the world. At the St. Louis World's Fair that year, they won a prize for their exhibit of a full-sized model house with a cutaway front, allowing fairgoers to admire the boiler and radiator heating system. (After the fair, the house was sold and moved to Webster Grove, Missouri, where it still stands.) American Radiator also published a booklet in 1904 encouraging customers to paint their radiators in multiple bright colors -- quite the difference from the habit today, of trying to hide the radiator by painting it to match the wall behind, or a neutral shade.
But what of the original boiler? All that we know for certain is that there was a coal bin in the basement "Heater Room" on the blueprints, so we can assume that it was coal-fired. It's also likely that it was one of American Radiator's matching "Ideal" model cast-iron boilers, such as the example below. This was also the the type on display in the World's Fair cutaway house. An illustration showing how the boiler worked can be found on pg. 199 of Baldwin's reference book (see notes).
Presumably the miserable servant, chattering after a winter's night with a peewee radiator in the chilly northwest bedroom, warmed up before dawn by shaking down cinders with the lever at left and shoveling fresh coal into the boiler's maw. Wasn't the Gilded Age grand?
NOTES: Should you ever need to repair an old radiator or hope to understand an antique heating system such as ours, see the classic reference of the era, "Hot Water Heating and Fitting" by William James Baldwin. Google Books has the 1908 edition as well as several earlier versions. The HeatingHelp.com library also is a great resource for old manuals and other source material.
