PIV

[stewamax]

My daughter once lived in an 1890s house. I was intrigued by one feature: a vent-grille around 6in inches square alongside but about three feet from the fireplace in her drawing room but not leading outside. I puzzled and puzzled; it must be something cunning to do with the fire?
Then I had a look in the loft and found the other end of the duct alongside the chimney breast.
Then it dawned on me : once the fire was drawing well, cold air from the loft would be sucked down to supply it and to provide a PIR with no fan (unsurprising since there was no electricity there until 1927).
Lofts were uninsulated then, but no-one except the rich and sick had fires lit in their bedrooms*, so lofts were probably colder than our insulated ones.


* anyone of a certain age - like me - will remember ice forming on the inside of their bedroom window, and the mental hell of summoning up courage to emerge from a hot bath when there was so much steam that the rest of the bathroom was invisible in the murk