I spent the better part of my childhood growing up in the frigid American northwest.
One of my earliest memories is climbing through a snowbank tunnel that my older siblings had dug out off to the side of our driveway.
We paid to have someone plow the driveway a few times a week, leaving these massive snow banks in our front yard for us to play in. Even our golden retriever Buskers would join us for fun out in the bitter cold each afternoon, even if it dipped below zero. For the longest time, we got by on simply using the old fireplace built into the old farm house we lived in. But, these old fireplaces can often be extremely inefficient at keeping heat from simply escaping up the chimney, instead of getting distributed throughout the house like a fan forced furnace would. Eventually, we settled for a wood stove that was just a slight bit less inefficient. Simply because the concentration of heat stayed in the living room this time, with a fraction of it escaping up the chimney compared to the old fireplace. Years later, my wife and I own radiant heated flooring instead. Although the initial costs were considerably high, we have yet to find a more efficient way to keep our house warm during our cold winters here. All of the heat rises up from the floor and has to filter through the air in the house before it has a chance to escape through the ceiling or windows. Plus, we can set it to keep two different rooms at two different temperature settings if we want, which comes in handy at night when we only want to spend money keeping our bedroom warm, instead of warming the entire house. It’s hard to beat the efficiency and effectiveness of radiant heated floors.