Hotbed

“ This may seem a somewhat paradoxical statement, for at first thought it will seem impossible for air from without to come in without taking along with it the cold air which is in circulation outside, but when one takes into consideration the fact that the warm air inside the hotbed meets the air from out of doors at the point of entrance it will be understood that it repels or counteracts it to an extent that makes it safe to open the sash slightly when the outside temperature is nearly down to freezing-point. The hotbed-owner must study existing conditions and be governed accordingly. ”

“ You see, a hotbed is a tiny greenhouse. In both a greenhouse and a hotbed, artificial heat is supplied.
Greenhouses are heated by steam or hot water pipes: ordinary hotbeds are heated by fresh manure, which, in the process of decomposing, gives off a great amount of heat.
Heat, air and sunlight are essential for plants’ growth.
The slanting glass sash catches the sunshine, and holds in the heat which the manure gives off. The sashes are raised a little in the warmest part of each day, which gives the plants air. ”

“ The Hotbed, Cold-Frame and Sand-box The hotbed is an enclosure, affording bottom heat and protection from cold, for the propagation of tender plants unsuited to sowing in the open ground, and for starting plants too early in the season for open-air operations. The hotbed is usually started in February or March in the latitude of Philadelphia, while April is early enough in the latitude of Detroit and Chicago. Plants are transferred to the open ground when all danger of frost is past. ”

“ HOTBEDS, COLD FRAMES AND FLATS So important is the preparatory work performed by a well started and conducted hotbed that its use cannot be too insistently recommended. The smallest, least ambitious home garden is dependent upon the use of artificial heat in the starting of such plants as cabbage, cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes and the like, either in hotbeds on the home grounds, flats in the windows or plants grown in commercial greenhouses ”

“ During the bright warm days the sash of the hotbed should be raised or entirely removed, but be very watchful of the weather. Spring is such a treacherous time of year that the warm mornings may develop into frosty afternoons. Always replace the sash over the hotbed by three o’clock in the afternoon, and cover with mats before dusk. ”

“ Care of Hotbed and Cold-Frame. If the sun be allowed to shine brightly on the glass of a cold-frame or hotbed, it will soon raise the temperature in the hotbed to a point that will destroy the plants. ”

“ Beans, beets and Swiss chard, and such hardy things, which require two months or more to mature, do not suffer through the decrease of heat, in fact, will do just as well, or better, in a spent hotbed or cold-frame, which is just a hotbed without any heating material. ”

“ After thorough mixing, it is piled in a large heap and left exposed to the weather until required, or until late in the fall, when it is put into a shed and kept dry to prevent freezing, as potting-mould and covering for fresh hotbeds is often needed in the early spring. ”

“ It would scarcely pay to put in a hot water or steam heater for the express purpose of heating hotbeds, for if such an expense were incurred, it would be better to make a forcing-house. Hotbeds may be heated, however, with hot-air flues with very good results. A home-made brick furnace may be constructed in a pit at one end of the run and underneath a shed, and the smoke and hot air, instead of being carried directly upwards, is carried through a slightly rising horizontal pipe that runs underneath the beds. ”

“ While such flue-heated hotbeds may be eminently successful with a grower or builder of experience, it may nevertheless be said, as a general statement, that whenever such trouble and expense are incurred, it is better to make a forcing-house. ”

“ These methods—in all of which the heating agent is brought from another room into the one to be warmed—are of three kinds; heating by hot air, by hot water, and by steam.
When we speak of warming an apartment by heated air, it is necessary to give precision to the meaning of the term. All rooms are, in fact, warmed by heated air, for the stove or grate must raise the temperature of the air in the room before we can appreciate the sensation of warmth. ”

“ But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain—where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold. ”

“ Soon we were sitting, four men in all, at a little, nicely decorated table, cutting into the steaming platter and drinking out of small seidels a magnificent sparkling wine. The past day’s events had to be moistened a little with the best we had. This was our custom when the fortunes of war smiled graciously on us.
The electrical heating apparatus furnishes all the heat needed, but it still has the disadvantage that in the still, unchanged air, the heat arises so that the temperature at the floor is several [84] degrees colder than at the ceiling. ”

“ I will turn to the more agreeable subject—the operation of the bath, which is quite luxurious. The sensation experienced on first entering the hottest chamber is almost overpowering—the heat is extremely oppressive; and at first I believed that I could not long support such a temperature; but after the first minute, I was relieved by a gentle, and afterwards by a profuse perspiration, and no longer felt in any degree oppressed. It is always necessary for each lady to send her own bathing-linen, a pair of high clogs, a large copper vessel for hot water, two copper bowls, and towels. ”

“ I had hoped to have time to discuss the subject of heating more fully in connection with ventilation, but cannot; but I will state, in the simplest manner, a few of the leading points first.
You must have fresh air all the time. In summer you can get it by opening the doors and windows. In winter it must be warmed before entering the room. It must not enter the room cold and flow across the floor to the other side before it reaches the heating apparatus. ”

“ Furnaces, whether of hot water, steam, or hot air, are all healthy and admirable provisions for warming our houses during the eight or nine months of our year that we must have artificial heat, if only, as I have said, fireplaces keep up a current of ventilation. ”

“ Living between walls formed by inch-boards over-lapping each other, and which can only be made to resemble English rooms by being canvassed and papered inside, the pure fresh air finds its way in on all sides. A hot room in winter is an impossibility, in spite of drawn curtains and blazing fires, therefore the risk of sudden changes of temperature is avoided. ”

“ Sad, sad and drooping, looked the little white maiden as she stood on the hearth-rug, with the hot blast of the stove striking through her like a pestilence. Once she threw a glance toward the window, and caught a glimpse, [Pg 58] through its red curtains, of the snow-covered roofs and the stars glimmering frostily, and all the delicious intensity of the cold night. The bleak wind rattled the window-panes as if it were summoning her to come forth. But there stood the snow-child, drooping, before the hot stove!
But the common-sensible man saw nothing amiss. ”

“ I sat down for a little beside a box-stove in the bed-room, in which, owing to the coldness of the weather, a fire had been lighted, and prepared my mind for the worst. I put into the stove two or three additional billets of wood, covered the fire with ashes, so that it might last till the morning, and resolved to sit beside it all night. My companion and the driver shortly afterwards entered the room, and threw themselves into two of the beds, where they soon appeared or feigned to fall into a sound sleep. ”

“ A damp bed gives a cold, because the moist bedclothes are much better conductors of heat than are the same clothes when dry. The temperature of the body is lowered, and a cold results. Long exposure in bathing leads to similar consequences. The second feeling of cold in bathing tells that the body is becoming chilled, and that the production of heat is insufficient to meet the loss. A run on the river-bank, or a brisk walk after dressing, commonly restores the lost balance. ”

“ In the case of houses heated by furnaces, some moisture is furnished by the water-pans of the furnace; but in the case of heating by hot air and steam pipes, there is less circulation of air, the air is very much drier, and generally of a very much higher temperature. ”

“ For houses here are not constructed for extremes of temperature in either direction; and hot, dry air in the sitting-room, where the close stove crackles and grows red-hot, is a bad preparation for a bedroom with ten degrees of frost in it, or the outside air with the icy wind bringing a piece of Mount Hood and its glaciers into your very lungs. ”

“ The allowance of 40 cubic feet per head per minute should not, if properly distributed, cause an unpleasant draught in any part of the hot rooms; for it must be remembered that even in a highly-heated atmosphere a waft of air of the same temperature is felt to be cold. ”

“ There must be lights in sheltered corners of the fireplace, by the writing-desk, on each side of the dressing-table, and so on.
Then I consider the heating of the room. We Americans are slaves to steam heat. We ruin our furniture, our complexions, and our dispositions by this enervating atmosphere of too much heat. In my own houses I have a fireplace in each room, and I burn wood in it. There is a heating-system in the basement of my house, but it is under perfect control. I prefer the normal heat of sunshine and open fires. ”

“ Hot Baths,— by which are meant those of a temperature of from 85° to 105° F., are chiefly used in the treatment of ailments and diseases as powerful stimulants. Every parent should remember that a hot bath, causing free perspiration, followed by wrapping up warm in bed with blankets, will often save children and adults from severe attacks of illness, if promptly resorted to after exposure to cold or wet. ”

“ The objections to the fireplace as a sole means of heating are, its wastefulness, and the fact that it warms only by radiation, so that the room is unequally warmed, and may be too cold in one place and insupportably hot in another. ”

“ The temperature is falling, and it is so cold without a fire that though my bed is only a blanket-covered dais of brick and lime, dripped upon continually, in a window with forty draughts, I am glad to muffle myself up in its blankets and write among wraps. ”

“ Let the roof of the house be white-washed in summer, if it be slated and the bedrooms come right up under it, for this makes an enormous difference to the temperature of the rooms, which is often enough simply awful even in a merely average summer without any very abnormal heat, while, should we have any real heat, these rooms become similar to ovens, and are really terrible for anyone to have to sleep in. ”

“ Hot Baths are those which have a temperature above 98 or 100 degrees of Farenheit, and are occasionally increased to 110 or 120° and upwards, according to the particular nature of the case, and the constitution of the patient. As no prudent person, we trust, will have recourse to a hot bath, without medical advice, we shall but briefly enumerate a few particulars relative to its use, as well as its effects. ”

“ The most obvious defect we discovered in our house was that it was very cold—a universal English drawback—and the inadequate open fires seem to accentuate the chill.
Would that my feeble voice could do justice to the much-calumniated American methods of heating! It does pay to be less prejudiced and more comfortable! Possibly the furnace and steam heat may be a little overdone, but not with moderate care. No one can make me believe that it is healthy to sit shivering all over, or roasting on one side and freezing on the other. ”

“ The cooling rooms, which are surmounted by a lofty dome designed to permit the free circulation of air and to ensure perfect ventilation, are fitted in a most luxurious manner; the whole of the decorations of both cooling and hot rooms have been designed by most eminent authorities; while the heating and ventilation of the hot chambers are brought to a state of perfection by the use of the system first introduced by the Proprietors. ”

“ Let the bed be fully exposed to the open air, day and night, that its heat may come on gradually without burning; if excessive rains should happen, cast some dry litter at top, or spread garden mats, so as to shoot off the wet, lest it should perish the bed, or occasion it to heat violently and burn ”

“ The question of how to warm our cottage will depend, in the first place, upon the climate and locality of the proposed dwelling, and furthermore upon its exposure. Three methods of warming the air of halls and rooms must be considered, namely, warming by open fire-places, by stoves and by hot-air furnaces. Direct and indirect heating by steam and by hot-water apparatus are excluded on account of their cost for buildings, such as here shown. ”

“ In sitting-rooms and in bedrooms it is equally essential to maintain an equable temperature; a fire in a bedroom is of first value at this season. The fire sustains the external warmth, encourages ventilation, and gives health not less than comfort. ”

“ Respecting the questions of heating, ventilation, and covering, a few more words may be added.
I have before recommended hot water tanks for supplying bottom heat, with attached pipes for the circulation of hot water to warm the atmosphere. I can see no reason for recommending any other arrangement now; for the experience of successive years goes to show that hot water, applied on sound principles, is, above all other means of heating, effective in its operation ”