I spent a lot of my time during my childhood growing up in the bitter cold 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 dwelling. The group of us paid to have someone plow the driveway a few times each week, leaving these monstrous snow banks in our front yard for us to play in. Even our golden retriever Buskers would join us for the best of times out in the bitter freezing 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 home we were residing in. But, these old fireplaces can often be severely inefficient at keeping heat from simply escaping up the chimney, instead of getting distributed throughout the dwelling basically like a fan forced heating appliance would. Eventually, we settled for a wood stove that was just a slight bit less inefficient, and simply because the concentration of heat remained in the dwelling this time, with a fraction of it escaping up the chimney compared to the old fireplace. Years later, my partner & I decided to invest in radiant heated flooring instead. Although the initial costs were quite high, we have yet to find a more efficient way to keep our dwelling hot while in our freezing winters in these parts. All of the heat rises up from the floor & has to filter through the air in the dwelling before it has a chance to escape through the ceiling or windows. Plus, we can set it to keep various rooms at various temperature settings if we choose to, which comes in handy during the evening when we only want to spend money keeping our bedroom warm, instead of warming the entire dwelling. It’s strenuous to beat the efficiency & effectiveness of radiant heated floors.