I say ‘modern’ with good reason. For much as we might bracket underfloor heating with the technology of today, it is amongst the oldest heating techniques we know of. We’ll leave the old-fashioned heap of burning wood aside from that assessment. The Romans, being among the most technically advanced cultures at the time, found themselves invading colder countries than they were used to. Acclimatised to the ripe indulgent stare of the sun back home, invading a dismal place like 1st century England brought much discomfort. Rome’s greatest minds thought long and hard to solve this problem.

By basically propping up their villas on large numbers of small columns, they created unseen space underfoot. Then, setting fires at specially designed apertures, the heat and smoke from the fires would heat the air. This continual warming from beneath kept the Romans snug as a bug in a rug despite predilection for cold clothes like togas and leather skirts whilst trying to bring theater to Wales.

Modern under floor heating is thankfully, a bit more up to date but uses the same idea. Heated elements under the floor – typically hot water pipes – circulate heat beneath your feet and thus make your home that bit less chilly.

A modern heating system has great advantages over other options. Most pertinently, most other sources of heat are generally mounted on the wall, like radiators, wall-heaters etc. Firstly, this means that they are raised off the floor. As heat rises, this means that your toes – which are susceptible to feeling the chill – never get the benefit. Secondly, much heat ends up heating the bricks instead of taking the chill out of the air. While your bricks are nice and warm you might be waiting an age to feel any warmth at all.

Luckily for the interested, installation is no longer a big engineering job. You can just ‘get a man in’, but also lots of self-installation tools that let the average Joe fit it themselves. So don’t fear the onset of winter chill – start looking into getting underfloor heating.

Erroll lives in Britain’s coldest house. Perishing even in summer thanks to its colossal brick stone walls, it plummets to approximately -67 with freezing regularity in the winter. Fortunately, he has tremendous underfloor heating systems installed, and consequently still has the use of all of his toes.

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Roman architects designed a central heating system called a hypocaust. The word, hypocaustum means “heat from below.” The raised floors were held up by short pillars and spaces beneath them and inside the walls were heated with the hot smoke and air from the fire chamber. Walls were fitted with ceramic box-shaped tiles that served as flues to channel the burned air and smoke to the outside, as well as to warm them. The more warmth needed, the closer to the hypocausts they were located.

It was a pretty expensive and labor-intensive method, so hypocausts were reserved for public baths and upper class villas. In about 25 B.C. Sergius Orata figured out how to cut down on the overhead by putting the male and female bathing rooms close to the hypocausts and right next door to each other.

Korean traditional architecture uses an Ondol. This underfloor heating method depends on direct heat transfer from a wood fire maintained underneath a thick floor made of masonry. From the central firebox or stove area, usually accessible from the kitchen or master bedroom, a system of horizontal channels spider out underneath the structure. A chimney on the opposite side of the building from the firebox ensures a decent draft system.

One of the Korean twists is that while traditional masonry is used for the channels and to support the thick floor, they added an additional layer of something impervious to smoke and fumes, such as layers of stone slabs, clay and oil paper. The system works well and is in used today in many of their buildings, notably in an orphanage.

When American missionaries discovered small children sleeping on pallets and babies sleeping in boxes on the floor, they went to great lengths to obtain thousands of cribs. Even after their arrival, the well-meaning folks were baffled to find the children were still sleeping on pallets and babies were still in boxes on the floor. Only after considerable questioning did they figure out that it was the best way to keep the little ones warm since the floors were warmed in the traditional manner.

Today’s furnaces and forced air ventilation systems provide the latest in safe, efficient central heating. Filters ensure that pollutants from the outside are kept at a minimum and the closed heat production part of the system either confines or eliminates any potentially toxic substances.

We’ve come a long way, but the level of comfort we enjoy today stands on the shoulders of some pretty smart cookies who lived a very long time ago.

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