As young students in the seventies, we visited British countryside. We wondered why all the plumbing was on the outside of the houses. We were told that it is safe.

Also, a lot of that stuff was retro-fitted.

As young students in the seventies, we visited British countryside. We wondered why all the plumbing was on the outside of the houses. We were told that it is safe: you can melt the pipes with a torch without burning down the house. We were amazed by the ingenuity…

Heh… I guess it was and your quite right. I yield the point.

To make matters worse, an incandescent light bulb is significantly less than 100% efficient as a heat source while pure resistive heating is (for all practical purposes) 100% conversion efficient.

That’s a very low threshold of “significant.” Aside from light leaving by windows (a small fraction of a low efficiency) every watt of power used by a lamp ends up as heat in the room.

You have a pilot light?

Richard Simons: …incandescent lights were actually cheaper to operate, at least in the winter, because of the reduction in heating bills.

If a home used electrical resistance heating primarily, then the difference between incandescent and fluorescent lighting might be close to a wash in wintertime. Otherwise no. Even in these times of rising energy costs, the difference between electricity as a resistive heat source and natural gas/fuel oil remains too great.

To make matters worse, an incandescent light bulb is significantly less than 100% efficient as a heat source while pure resistive heating is (for all practical purposes) 100% conversion efficient.

As always, insulation is your friend and we wound up using heat tape for those few days (weeks) a year when it gets extremely cold. We just had to remember to plug it in. Interestingly enough it was always the hot water pipe that froze. Hopefully nobody runs water pipes along foundations in unheated crawl spaces anymore. But yes, we used incandescent light bulbs to keep things from freezing for a time including baby chickens, pigs, puppies, kittens, what have you out in the barn. Of course we also had regular infrared heat lamps for that as well. Not to close though.

Which reminds me of an incident we had around here a few years ago having a small contingent of homeless guys who preferred to camp out on the shoals at the confluence of a river and a large stream. Offering little to no shelter from the elements the guys would build fires over the bedrock – favorite places being larger stone slabs – until the rock would build up enough heat to carry over the night. A blanket or two, perhaps a sleeping bag if lucky and maybe a plastic tarp of some fashion should the weather be inclement, the guys would lay upon the rocks for comfortable sleeping.

This being a practice that continues to this day, on one frozen morning a more unfortunate fellow was found peacefully dead and quite well done having been slow roasted in his slumber. The Darwinian lesson to be learned I suppose is that you simply want to warm the rock and so too our small, furred and feathered friends.