If you have purchased an old house with no heating plant or are building a new house, the type of heating used will largely depend on what your architect considers practical and what you can pay for.  The chief systems, viewed in descending order of expense, are hot water, steam, piped hot air, and the pipeless furnace.  All of these can be fitted to burn either coal or oil.

Provided one can meet the initial expense of purchase and installation, the ideal system is probably the oil burning, electrically run, hot water heating system.  Barring the final perfection of the robot, it is as near to a mechanical servant as one is likely to get even in this age of invention.  There is no shoveling or sifting of ashes.  There is no furnace shaking or stoking, no puzzling over dampers.  Periodically and for a price, a man comes and fills the oil tank.  A thermostat regulates the heat.  You have only to set it for the desired temperature and forget it.

There is just one flaw with this perfect system.  It is dependent on electricity.  Let that fail and there is trouble.  The fine copper radiators, so efficient when all goes well, spring leaks if the water in them freezes.  A few years ago an unusually severe blizzard in the North Atlantic states worked havoc with all of the modern devices.  Roads were blocked, telephone and electric service lines were down, and even train service was impaired.  One of our neighbors had built a new house two or three years before and equipped it with practically every appliance known to modern comfort, including an oil burner.

In a few short hours this blizzard had set him back more than a century.  Electricity, of course, failed and the heat in his fine furnace dwindled and died.  It grew colder and colder, ultimately reaching twenty degrees below zero.  Added to the discomfort of the family was the disquieting knowledge that the freezing point would mean cracked radiators.  Luckily he had three fireplaces that really worked.  He had plenty of wood.  So for three days and nights, he and two other members of his family worked in relays to keep roaring fires going in all three fireplaces.  In this way they maintained a temperature of at least 40 degrees and so saved pipes and radiators.

One may argue that, if water freezing in radiators and pipes is all, why not drain them in such an emergency.  This is a job for a plumber, as it must be done with a thoroughness that leaves no moisture behind.  The average layman has neither the skill nor the tools for it.  Therefore, if there comes a winter when snow, ice, high winds, and low temperatures cause you to wonder if living in the country the year around is quite sound and you decide that a few weeks in a nice city apartment would be a good idea, close your house, if it seems more expedient than leaving a caretaker behind, but don’t try to save the plumber’s fee.  Remember pipes, radiators, and valves cannot be mended.  They have to be replaced and that is expensive.