On Mon, 22 Jan 2018 20:11:28 -0500, micky
wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Mon, 22 Jan 2018 18:15:09 -0500, Clare Snyder
wrote:

On Mon, 22 Jan 2018 12:31:27 -0600, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 01/22/2018 10:52 AM, trader_4 wrote:

[snip]

I don't think electric heat is common anywhere, except maybe in very
warm areas of the country where heat is very seldom used and even then
only lightly.

I've been in several apartments in east Texas, that were all-electric.

My mother lived in a small 2-bedroom house in Allentown, Pa. that had
been built with radiant heat in the cement slab it was on. Before or
soon after she moved in, they had trouble with the tubes and replaced it
with electric baseboard heat. Yes, it was expensive to run, and with
the baseboard heat, the floor was cold. I don't know if any neighbors
also had electric or not.


[snip]
"gold medallion" all electric homes were the "cat's meow" back in the
early seventies in Ontario.

They pushed them on TV a lot in the US, in the 60's iirc. They showed
one that actually had a gold-colored disk embedded in the front stoop.

But we already had a gas water heater, furnace, and garbage incinerator
in the suburban house in Indianapolis, built some time before 1954. By
this time my mother was a widow, and to save money she wouldn't use the
gas in the incinerator. She just mixed newspaper with the banana peels,
let it all dry, and burned it that way. (No AC, at all, but the next
owners added AC to the heating.) The few cans we had, she cut the
bottom and top off of, crushed the can, and accepted the invitation of
the man** next door to add a small package to his garbage, which he paid
to have collected. **Married, innocent invitation. A single man of the
right age on the other side of the house, but I don't think she ever
even talked to him. I don't know why.


In our older small-town city detached home before that, we had coal, and
my father bought an electric-stoker, so he could fill it before he went
to work each day, and my mother wouldn't have to shovel coal. But that
still meant my 53+ year old father, born in 1892, had to shovel a lot of
coal so around 1947 or 49, he changed to gas. No shoveling at all.
We had forced air heat then, and I thought we had it even when the
furnace used coal. That's possible, right?

Possible, but most likely a "gravity"furnace - worked on convection.
Looked like an octapus.

I was newborn and the room wasn't warm enough, so he had a separate fan
put in the duct to my room.

While we're at it, the house didn't have enough receptacles, and I'm
just about sure he hired an electrician, not a handy-man, and the guy
drilled a hole just above the baseboard from the closet in the other
room, ran lamp cord through the hole, plugged one end into the outlet in
the closet and ran the other end along the baseboard in my room to a
surface-mount outlet.

It's been 60 years since I left there, but if I ever go by again, I'm
going to stop and check if they still use that outlet.

I think they added central AC too, so it will be even more interesting
if the outlet is still in use.

Every place I've ever lived is in nicer condition now than it was when I
lived there. (They were always in the same condition when I moved out as
when I moved in.) Except where I live now. I'm counting on the next
owners to fix it up again.


Then Natural Gas became available and Ontario Hydro priced itself out
of the market.

Privatization, as Hydro One made it incrementally worse - - -