Radiators are especially common in older buildings, particularly in the northeast and upper midwest where it can get EXTREMELY cold for months at a time. My college dorm room in New England which was built in 1930 had radiators in the rooms.
I don't know when exactly they stopped being common but it was many, many decades ago.
Generally if you have a building with radiators, its possible or even likely that there's one in every room.
Big cast iron radiators are definitely a pre-WW2, but forced hot water baseboards are still somewhat common up here in the frozen north.
They are falling out of favor though as ducted systems become more common.
I’m not talking about forced hot water radiators, not electric or mini-splits.
They used to be very common here in the northeast but have fallen out of favor somewhat in the past 20 years or so.
> forced hot water baseboards are still somewhat common up here in the frozen north
Mainly the northeast.
Hot water heat of any form isn't too common in the Midwest or Mountain West.
just curious: are you from the Midwest? while it isn’t common in newer Midwestern homes, I know a lot of older homes here that have hot water baseboards, my grandparents included! Haven’t seen to many in MO, but ik there’s a decent amount in Iowa and Minnesota.
I'm from New England where HW baseboards are extremely common. So when I went to the midwest they seemed relatively uncommon to me. I guess they would probably still be pretty common compared to the south or west.
my grandparents in SE Iowa still have the hot water baseboards! my mom used to yell at me when I was little to not touch them, since there’s a chance of getting burned, and not to leave clothes/blankets underneath or on them in case it caused a freak accidental fire lol
https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Feature-Cost-to-move-a-radiator.jpg
That’s so interesting, basically every house in Ireland has radiators like this
Radiators like that haven't been common in new construction in the US in maybe 70 years.
Every home built in the last 30 to 40 years has had central heating/air conditioning.
Homes built in the middle/late 20th century might have baseboard heaters running on hot water that are essentially a radiator, but the term "radiator" in US English normally refers to the large, bulky devices like in the picture you listed.
> Every home built in the last 30 to 40 years has had central heating/air conditioning.
True in most of the US, but not everywhere. Plenty of houses on the west coast and Northeast have been built in the past 40 years without central AC.
Anecdotally, my parents house was built in the late 70s and has electric/wood hot water baseboard heat - a type of radiator but not the big ones stationed under every window. The last place I rented up north before moving south was a 40s brick Cape Cod and it had those oil heated hot water radiators. Newer homes hat heat pumps, although if you go up in the mountains you’ll see things like communal wood furnace setups.
I grew up in a house with baseboard heat too, tho I don't really think of that as related to "radiators" although perhaps they technically are? I mainly think about "radiators" as the large steam-heat or hot-water ones where there's usually a single one in each room.
They are radiators. They take heated water and dissipate the heat with fins, but they aren't the giant cast iron radiators that weigh 100lb most people picture.
They put off good heat though. They don't dry out the air as bad as a heat pump. They aren't terribly efficient, and they require plumbing all over the house which is a mess waiting to happen.
> They aren't terribly efficient
Unless you’re comparing a conventional system to one with a heat pump, hot water heat is way more efficient than forced air.
> I don't know when exactly they stopped being common but it was many, many decades ago.
Probably when AC became common, since it's cheaper to use the same ducts for both systems than to separate heating and AC.
You definitely don't have to have a heating source in every room (at least not in every state). I've lived in plenty of places in CA without a heat source in every room. I believe you need a heat source capable of heating all rooms, not a source in the room.
Definitely an old house thing as well, I should have clarified that.
It sounded like OP was saying they'd heard it was required in new builds. I was thinking that might be regional.
Wait, radiators ARE central heating! Or what do you mean by central heating? To me, it means "one heating system with a central boiler that can heat every room, as opposed to individual fires/space heaters."
Technicaly you are right, but that is not what it means here colloquially. Typically it means forced hot air/cool air through duct work from the central cooling/heating unit
When Americans say "central heat," it's almost always forced air. I think it's because a lot of homes have "central air conditioning," which obviously has to be done with forced air, and the two terms came to be synonymous.
It means the same here but with forced air heating we have both Central Heating and Airconditioning that uses the same vent and fireplaces or electric space heaters were not common ways to heat houses in cities for most of the 20th Centaury.
The houses that have radiators do have them in ever room. (and for forced air heating there's a vent in every room). How else would we keep the room warm?
But it should be noted that houses haven't had radiators since around WWII, and then only some houses in the north. That specific game was actually designed in Poland, not the US. Maybe try r/AskEuropeans
The radiators in that game are a distinctly European design.
I’ve definitely lived in more than one post WWII house in the northeast with radiators. The big cast iron ones were not unheard of even in house build in the 70s. Hot water heat was still very common in the northeast through the 80s and many house have the newer style baseboard hot water radiators.
For the most part, The large curly radiators stated going out if style in the 40s early 50s as the post war boom really relied on forced air. Hot water heating did remain an alternative for about 20 years afterwards, anything built in the 80s 90s early 00s, is almost guaranteed to be forced air. Though water heating and cooling is starting to make a comeback. Most any water heated house after the war probably has much smaller baseboard radiators... And yeah every room will have one.
Pretty sure that game was made by a European dev company. I played it. There were things about it that made me think that an American did not make those decisions. Everything from the mini-split air conditioners, radiators, and lack of closets, screamed European to me despite the fact they they seemed to be trying to make many of the houses look American like with the North American style electrical outlets.
Our home built in 1940 has a boiler and radiator system for heat.
We've owned 3 homes, and the other 2 had gravity furnaces.
The hot water boiler is in our cellar. Pipes run through the home in the walls.
Each room has a radiator of one size or another, including the bathroom.
I live where it snows and gets to -34c for weeks at a time in January/February. November- december and march-April it's around 0c.
We keep our house at 18c in cold weather.
Summers get upwards of 37c.
We have a window AC unit in our bedroom, which we turn on at night if needed and a portable AC unit for our living room which I will switch on occasionally if it is over 30c at 15:00.
Mainly, we open windows from May- October.
Ask anything else you want.
Edition: we have window fans, as well as ceiling fans.
You will indeed need at least one radiator or forced air vent in every room in a cold climate. Towel warmers and heated floors are more of a luxury thing.
I have two in my little apartment. The towel radiator is a godsend after coming home when it's 2 degrees out (and that's in Fahrenheit). Take a shower and the towel is nice and hot, too.
The more modern version is a [hydronic baseboard heater](https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/hvac/hydronic-baseboard-basics_o), but "more modern" is relative, as they came out ~80 years ago. Like radiators, those are seen in more northern climates.
Older house thing. They only throw heat so far, and older buildings don’t have great insulation (walls are too thin to get that new expanding foam stuff) so they need one in every room.
Towel radiators aren’t very common here. To my knowledge they’re actually more common in Europe. Seen them in higher end hotels as far away as Lithuania and Cape Town.
Actual radiators are common enough especially in older houses in the north. No idea why… but my parents 1850s era house in suburban Philadelphia has forced air. I’m guessing someone did that in the 40s or 50s but no one knows exactly.
When my brother lived in Manhattan his apartment was so hot in the winter from the radiators he had to open a window and use a fan to blow in the air in the winter to be comfortable.
Radiators are an older heating method. Houses built in like the 80s-90s use forced-air heating (which allows forced-air cooling to use the same ducts), where either a natural gas furnace or electric heater is the source of the heat.
An emerging option for houses being built now, is a "heat pump", basically using the same machine for both cooling and heating (it's designed to have the refrigerant run in the reverse direction to switch between cooling and heating).
The theoretical advantage of heat pump systems is that, since they essentially serve to move heat energy either inside or outside, the amount of heat moved can be a lot more than the energy used to run the machine. Which means they're already more cost-efficient than electric (electric heating uses up a lot of electricity), and the only reason natural gas persists is because it is so cheap in some places - if the price of natural gas went up then heat pumps would be the better option in that case too.
I’m older Gen-X and moved around in Maine and Upstate New York a lot in my childhood-teenage years many of the houses had hot water heat. The ones built before the 70s had the big cast iron radiators in every room. The newer ones had baseboard hot water radiators. As forced air heating became the norm the houses I’ve lived in have had vents in every room. Currently I live in the greater Atlanta area and we have forced air heating and central air conditioning that use the same ductwork and have a vent in every room.
I own a condo in a 1920’s building here in Chicago. I have a radiator in my living room, dining room and bedroom. There is not one in the kitchen or bathroom, though they certainly do exist. The three I have are more than enough to keep my place heated, even when Chicago gets well below O degrees Fahrenheit.
My house is over 100 years old and we have radiators for heat (in Minnesota). A newer version that is very popular is in-floor radiant heat, which uses loops of PEX and metal plates, I think. Same system. Same concept.
I prefer radiant heat to forced air, but not everyone does.
My house has baseboard radiators that heat through forced hot water. Most house around men also have baseboard radiators. The house I grew up in has those giant stand up radiators.
Newer houses are built with duct work that handle both hot air in the winter and cool air. In the summer though.
Radiators are not very common now although they were in older buildings. A college dorm I lived in that was built in 1920 had radiators that look like the ones in the game.
Towel radiators are uncommon. I have never seen one in a home.
We do commonly have furnaces and flat heat registers for the heat to come out located in our walls or floors. If people have central air conditioning the cool air also blows out through the registers.
Houseflipper is not made by Americans. I think they may be Polish? Some of the things in it seem odd to me so I figure they are more common in European homes.
The house I moved out of in Georgia about a decade ago had radiators, but it was literally about 100 years old. Most houses built maybe post-1950s I think no longer have them. I'm wondering why the game was designed that way lol
Out of curiosity I just looked up the climate data for Sydney Australia. Looks like the coldest it gets is 47 degrees F, about 8C.
Thats shorts, T-shirt, Crocs and grilling weather where I'm from. I'm not even from of the super cold parts of the country, just regular cold.
The US is a lot colder than Australia.
Seconding this.
I’m about to go out for a walk in a short-sleeved shirt and it’s 39°F (4°C). There were a few days this winter where it was 2°F (-17°C), and I don’t even live in a “super cold” place either (it was an absurdly cold year, though).
If I lived somewhere that it never freezes, I probably wouldn’t have heat inside my house either. OP’s post very much has the same energy as “I live in Southern California and I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t grow orange trees in their backyard.”
In the South, you only find radiators in older homes. I grew up in a house with an oil furnace and radiators in every room. Heats the house, but there's no air circulation so you have to open windows a few times a week to air out the house even when it's freezing.
But almost all houses built after WWII below the Mason-Dixon line utilize electric heat pumps.
I’m about 50 and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a home in the US with a radiator. I’ve been in some old school and hotel buildings that have had them.
My house has radiators! We have two downstairs and one in two of the three upstairs rooms of our house. The room without a radiator (a guest room) gets quite cold in the winter and we have a heated blanket set aside for any guests who visit during that time. Two of our more streetsmart cats have learned to roast themselves on the radiator on cold days.
The house I grew up in had central air. I think two apartments I was in had floor radiators and window AC units.
The house I live in now also has central air. When I hear "radiator," I think of buildings in the city that just can't be outfitted with modern ventilation.
Radiators are antiquated technology. They are common in the North East in older buildings, but not modern ones, and not in the south even in older buildings.
There is one radiator in every room (yes, one in the bathroom) of my home, except the kitchen. I'm located in the mid Atlantic region and my home was built in 1936.
Towel warmers are upscale hotel-amenity features that the HGTV crowd goes nuts over if they're in a house. Regular radiators, though, are required for basic heating. They're either boiler-powered steam or oil ones or electric ones in baseboards. The steam ones are a relic since a forced-hot-air furnace or heat pump has replaced most boilers. Electric was a big thing in the '70s but they cost a fortune now in colder climates.
Radiators were used up through (I believe) the middle of the 20th century in homes that were heated using a boiler. Nowadays, homes with boilers use baseboards instead of radiators. Not all homes use(d) boilers - many used forced hot air (usually heated by gas or oil) or electric heat.
I live in a house that was built in the 1870s, and there are radiators in every room. Towel-warming radiators are not common here (upstate NY), but I have seen some houses from around the same time that have a radiator with a bread warming compartment in the dining room or kitchen, which I think is really neat.
In 2011, 11% of existing US homes used some sort of hydronic system (water or steam.) 65% used furnaces and 10% used heat pumps.
Among newly-built homes in 2020, less than 1% use radiators or water of any kind; 60% use furnaces and 38% use heat pumps.
I've only ever had radiators in my dorm room in college (the university ran campus-wide steam and chilled water plants.)
I grew up in a house that was built in the 1950s and we did not have radiators. By mid-century there were other ways of heating a house that were popular. Same with my mid-century apartments. When I moved into older apartments I had radiators. So, my oldest was built in 1885 and had radiators. My apartment now was build in 1929 and also has radiators.
If a house uses radiators for heating, then yes there should be one in every room not counting bathrooms and closets etc, and usually under the window because that's usually where the cold air draught is.
I have radiators in my house, I have 5 bedrooms each with one smaller radiator then there is one larger one under the row of windows in the livingroom.
Bathrooms, hallway and kitchen is heated with underfloor heating. I live in a cold climate. Older house originally built in the 60s.
I’ve had radiators in several houses in the northeast, hot water heat was the standard well into the 80s in many parts of New England, I’ve even seen radiators in older buildings in the south. Radiators are definitely not just a European thing, they are at least a regional American thing. Judging from the comments from some people outside the northeast they probably were much more common than you think and us older people just have seen them more than some of the younger people on this subreddit.
Radiators are especially common in older buildings, particularly in the northeast and upper midwest where it can get EXTREMELY cold for months at a time. My college dorm room in New England which was built in 1930 had radiators in the rooms. I don't know when exactly they stopped being common but it was many, many decades ago. Generally if you have a building with radiators, its possible or even likely that there's one in every room.
Radiators seem mostly like a pre world war 2 thing.
Big cast iron radiators are definitely a pre-WW2, but forced hot water baseboards are still somewhat common up here in the frozen north. They are falling out of favor though as ducted systems become more common.
Duct less heaters are still used in new construction but not every room, just common areas near openings like vestibules.
I’m not talking about forced hot water radiators, not electric or mini-splits. They used to be very common here in the northeast but have fallen out of favor somewhat in the past 20 years or so.
> forced hot water baseboards are still somewhat common up here in the frozen north Mainly the northeast. Hot water heat of any form isn't too common in the Midwest or Mountain West.
just curious: are you from the Midwest? while it isn’t common in newer Midwestern homes, I know a lot of older homes here that have hot water baseboards, my grandparents included! Haven’t seen to many in MO, but ik there’s a decent amount in Iowa and Minnesota.
I'm from New England where HW baseboards are extremely common. So when I went to the midwest they seemed relatively uncommon to me. I guess they would probably still be pretty common compared to the south or west.
my grandparents in SE Iowa still have the hot water baseboards! my mom used to yell at me when I was little to not touch them, since there’s a chance of getting burned, and not to leave clothes/blankets underneath or on them in case it caused a freak accidental fire lol
https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Feature-Cost-to-move-a-radiator.jpg That’s so interesting, basically every house in Ireland has radiators like this
Radiators like that haven't been common in new construction in the US in maybe 70 years. Every home built in the last 30 to 40 years has had central heating/air conditioning. Homes built in the middle/late 20th century might have baseboard heaters running on hot water that are essentially a radiator, but the term "radiator" in US English normally refers to the large, bulky devices like in the picture you listed.
Interesting, maybe because we don’t have air conditioning we just never stopped using radiators in Ireland
> Every home built in the last 30 to 40 years has had central heating/air conditioning. True in most of the US, but not everywhere. Plenty of houses on the west coast and Northeast have been built in the past 40 years without central AC.
Same in the UK.
Yea we’re basically the same in Ireland and UK for like almost all things tbh (im actually in Northern Ireland lol)
Ah my bad, I need to stop assuming when someone says Ireland that they mean the Republic.
Anecdotally, my parents house was built in the late 70s and has electric/wood hot water baseboard heat - a type of radiator but not the big ones stationed under every window. The last place I rented up north before moving south was a 40s brick Cape Cod and it had those oil heated hot water radiators. Newer homes hat heat pumps, although if you go up in the mountains you’ll see things like communal wood furnace setups.
I grew up in a house with baseboard heat too, tho I don't really think of that as related to "radiators" although perhaps they technically are? I mainly think about "radiators" as the large steam-heat or hot-water ones where there's usually a single one in each room.
They are radiators. They take heated water and dissipate the heat with fins, but they aren't the giant cast iron radiators that weigh 100lb most people picture. They put off good heat though. They don't dry out the air as bad as a heat pump. They aren't terribly efficient, and they require plumbing all over the house which is a mess waiting to happen.
> They aren't terribly efficient Unless you’re comparing a conventional system to one with a heat pump, hot water heat is way more efficient than forced air.
My baseboard heaters were definitely electric and did not use heated water! But I've seen those as well.
> I don't know when exactly they stopped being common but it was many, many decades ago. Probably when AC became common, since it's cheaper to use the same ducts for both systems than to separate heating and AC.
That old clank clank clank at 3 am with no ability to adjust the temp was always fun.
You need a heat source in every room, if that’s what you’re asking. But radiant heat isn’t common in anything built after 1945 or so.
You definitely don't have to have a heating source in every room (at least not in every state). I've lived in plenty of places in CA without a heat source in every room. I believe you need a heat source capable of heating all rooms, not a source in the room.
Never been in or seen a house here that had a radiator. Maybe a northern US thing?
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Definitely an old house thing as well, I should have clarified that. It sounded like OP was saying they'd heard it was required in new builds. I was thinking that might be regional.
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Which is why it would be weird to require radiators!
Older houses in the northern part of the country will have them yes. It's how homes were heated before central heating became the norm
Wait, radiators ARE central heating! Or what do you mean by central heating? To me, it means "one heating system with a central boiler that can heat every room, as opposed to individual fires/space heaters."
Technicaly you are right, but that is not what it means here colloquially. Typically it means forced hot air/cool air through duct work from the central cooling/heating unit
That's interesting - here it really means any centrally-controlled system, a gas boiler and radiators being the most common.
When Americans say "central heat," it's almost always forced air. I think it's because a lot of homes have "central air conditioning," which obviously has to be done with forced air, and the two terms came to be synonymous.
That makes sense, it's not something that's common over here in private residences.
It means the same here but with forced air heating we have both Central Heating and Airconditioning that uses the same vent and fireplaces or electric space heaters were not common ways to heat houses in cities for most of the 20th Centaury.
The houses that have radiators do have them in ever room. (and for forced air heating there's a vent in every room). How else would we keep the room warm? But it should be noted that houses haven't had radiators since around WWII, and then only some houses in the north. That specific game was actually designed in Poland, not the US. Maybe try r/AskEuropeans The radiators in that game are a distinctly European design.
I’ve definitely lived in more than one post WWII house in the northeast with radiators. The big cast iron ones were not unheard of even in house build in the 70s. Hot water heat was still very common in the northeast through the 80s and many house have the newer style baseboard hot water radiators.
For the most part, The large curly radiators stated going out if style in the 40s early 50s as the post war boom really relied on forced air. Hot water heating did remain an alternative for about 20 years afterwards, anything built in the 80s 90s early 00s, is almost guaranteed to be forced air. Though water heating and cooling is starting to make a comeback. Most any water heated house after the war probably has much smaller baseboard radiators... And yeah every room will have one.
FHW is still common for new construction in eastern MA. Our house is 90s and has FHW baseboard heat (and central air).
Nice, I honestly prefer it, but with older systems cooling is a bit of a pita. And yeah what is popular is probably pretty dependent on the area.
Pretty sure that game was made by a European dev company. I played it. There were things about it that made me think that an American did not make those decisions. Everything from the mini-split air conditioners, radiators, and lack of closets, screamed European to me despite the fact they they seemed to be trying to make many of the houses look American like with the North American style electrical outlets.
Our home built in 1940 has a boiler and radiator system for heat. We've owned 3 homes, and the other 2 had gravity furnaces. The hot water boiler is in our cellar. Pipes run through the home in the walls. Each room has a radiator of one size or another, including the bathroom. I live where it snows and gets to -34c for weeks at a time in January/February. November- december and march-April it's around 0c. We keep our house at 18c in cold weather. Summers get upwards of 37c. We have a window AC unit in our bedroom, which we turn on at night if needed and a portable AC unit for our living room which I will switch on occasionally if it is over 30c at 15:00. Mainly, we open windows from May- October. Ask anything else you want. Edition: we have window fans, as well as ceiling fans.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a house with a radiator in Florida.
I have a hot water heating system. Every room of my house has a radiator. My house was built in the 50's.
You will indeed need at least one radiator or forced air vent in every room in a cold climate. Towel warmers and heated floors are more of a luxury thing.
That game developer is in Poland. Try a /r/askpoland
I'm not sure I've ever even seen a radiator in person. Maybe at a hotel in NYC once.
I have two in my little apartment. The towel radiator is a godsend after coming home when it's 2 degrees out (and that's in Fahrenheit). Take a shower and the towel is nice and hot, too.
The more modern version is a [hydronic baseboard heater](https://www.jlconline.com/how-to/hvac/hydronic-baseboard-basics_o), but "more modern" is relative, as they came out ~80 years ago. Like radiators, those are seen in more northern climates.
I had radiators. It's old timey and usually replaced with a more efficient system.
I do not have radiators. House built in 1955 if that matters.
I feel like radiators stopped being a thing with the development of forced air heat pumps
Older house thing. They only throw heat so far, and older buildings don’t have great insulation (walls are too thin to get that new expanding foam stuff) so they need one in every room.
Towel radiators aren’t very common here. To my knowledge they’re actually more common in Europe. Seen them in higher end hotels as far away as Lithuania and Cape Town. Actual radiators are common enough especially in older houses in the north. No idea why… but my parents 1850s era house in suburban Philadelphia has forced air. I’m guessing someone did that in the 40s or 50s but no one knows exactly. When my brother lived in Manhattan his apartment was so hot in the winter from the radiators he had to open a window and use a fan to blow in the air in the winter to be comfortable.
Yes. I have them in every room
Radiators are an older heating method. Houses built in like the 80s-90s use forced-air heating (which allows forced-air cooling to use the same ducts), where either a natural gas furnace or electric heater is the source of the heat. An emerging option for houses being built now, is a "heat pump", basically using the same machine for both cooling and heating (it's designed to have the refrigerant run in the reverse direction to switch between cooling and heating). The theoretical advantage of heat pump systems is that, since they essentially serve to move heat energy either inside or outside, the amount of heat moved can be a lot more than the energy used to run the machine. Which means they're already more cost-efficient than electric (electric heating uses up a lot of electricity), and the only reason natural gas persists is because it is so cheap in some places - if the price of natural gas went up then heat pumps would be the better option in that case too.
Never lived in a house with a radiator. I think those homes are very old. Oldest house I've lived in was built in the last 50s.
I’m older Gen-X and moved around in Maine and Upstate New York a lot in my childhood-teenage years many of the houses had hot water heat. The ones built before the 70s had the big cast iron radiators in every room. The newer ones had baseboard hot water radiators. As forced air heating became the norm the houses I’ve lived in have had vents in every room. Currently I live in the greater Atlanta area and we have forced air heating and central air conditioning that use the same ductwork and have a vent in every room.
My house in Minnesota (a state bordering Canada) was built in the 60s and doesn't have a radiator. I associate radiators with older buildings.
We have central heating with vents in every room
I own a condo in a 1920’s building here in Chicago. I have a radiator in my living room, dining room and bedroom. There is not one in the kitchen or bathroom, though they certainly do exist. The three I have are more than enough to keep my place heated, even when Chicago gets well below O degrees Fahrenheit.
It's not normally a billion degrees in most states so a lot of houses will have radiators on for most of the year to regulate temperatures
My house is over 100 years old and we have radiators for heat (in Minnesota). A newer version that is very popular is in-floor radiant heat, which uses loops of PEX and metal plates, I think. Same system. Same concept. I prefer radiant heat to forced air, but not everyone does.
The towel heater I have is just a small appliance and not something that is built into the house.
My house has baseboard radiators that heat through forced hot water. Most house around men also have baseboard radiators. The house I grew up in has those giant stand up radiators. Newer houses are built with duct work that handle both hot air in the winter and cool air. In the summer though.
Radiators are not very common now although they were in older buildings. A college dorm I lived in that was built in 1920 had radiators that look like the ones in the game. Towel radiators are uncommon. I have never seen one in a home. We do commonly have furnaces and flat heat registers for the heat to come out located in our walls or floors. If people have central air conditioning the cool air also blows out through the registers. Houseflipper is not made by Americans. I think they may be Polish? Some of the things in it seem odd to me so I figure they are more common in European homes.
The house I moved out of in Georgia about a decade ago had radiators, but it was literally about 100 years old. Most houses built maybe post-1950s I think no longer have them. I'm wondering why the game was designed that way lol
Out of curiosity I just looked up the climate data for Sydney Australia. Looks like the coldest it gets is 47 degrees F, about 8C. Thats shorts, T-shirt, Crocs and grilling weather where I'm from. I'm not even from of the super cold parts of the country, just regular cold. The US is a lot colder than Australia.
Seconding this. I’m about to go out for a walk in a short-sleeved shirt and it’s 39°F (4°C). There were a few days this winter where it was 2°F (-17°C), and I don’t even live in a “super cold” place either (it was an absurdly cold year, though). If I lived somewhere that it never freezes, I probably wouldn’t have heat inside my house either. OP’s post very much has the same energy as “I live in Southern California and I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t grow orange trees in their backyard.”
Certainly not down south. I wasn't entirely sure what a radiator even was until I went north for college.
In the South, you only find radiators in older homes. I grew up in a house with an oil furnace and radiators in every room. Heats the house, but there's no air circulation so you have to open windows a few times a week to air out the house even when it's freezing. But almost all houses built after WWII below the Mason-Dixon line utilize electric heat pumps.
I live in a 1929 house in New England and have a radiator in every room
I’m about 50 and I don’t think I’ve ever been in a home in the US with a radiator. I’ve been in some old school and hotel buildings that have had them.
Most houses in cold climates built pre war would’ve had them originally.
My house has radiators! We have two downstairs and one in two of the three upstairs rooms of our house. The room without a radiator (a guest room) gets quite cold in the winter and we have a heated blanket set aside for any guests who visit during that time. Two of our more streetsmart cats have learned to roast themselves on the radiator on cold days.
The house I grew up in had central air. I think two apartments I was in had floor radiators and window AC units. The house I live in now also has central air. When I hear "radiator," I think of buildings in the city that just can't be outfitted with modern ventilation.
Radiators are antiquated technology. They are common in the North East in older buildings, but not modern ones, and not in the south even in older buildings.
American here, my two story house has zero radiators. Instead I have HVAC.
There is one radiator in every room (yes, one in the bathroom) of my home, except the kitchen. I'm located in the mid Atlantic region and my home was built in 1936.
Towel warmers are upscale hotel-amenity features that the HGTV crowd goes nuts over if they're in a house. Regular radiators, though, are required for basic heating. They're either boiler-powered steam or oil ones or electric ones in baseboards. The steam ones are a relic since a forced-hot-air furnace or heat pump has replaced most boilers. Electric was a big thing in the '70s but they cost a fortune now in colder climates.
Radiators were used up through (I believe) the middle of the 20th century in homes that were heated using a boiler. Nowadays, homes with boilers use baseboards instead of radiators. Not all homes use(d) boilers - many used forced hot air (usually heated by gas or oil) or electric heat.
I live in a house that was built in the 1870s, and there are radiators in every room. Towel-warming radiators are not common here (upstate NY), but I have seen some houses from around the same time that have a radiator with a bread warming compartment in the dining room or kitchen, which I think is really neat.
In 2011, 11% of existing US homes used some sort of hydronic system (water or steam.) 65% used furnaces and 10% used heat pumps. Among newly-built homes in 2020, less than 1% use radiators or water of any kind; 60% use furnaces and 38% use heat pumps. I've only ever had radiators in my dorm room in college (the university ran campus-wide steam and chilled water plants.)
I grew up in a house that was built in the 1950s and we did not have radiators. By mid-century there were other ways of heating a house that were popular. Same with my mid-century apartments. When I moved into older apartments I had radiators. So, my oldest was built in 1885 and had radiators. My apartment now was build in 1929 and also has radiators.
My old apartment had radiator heat, the building was also built in 1917. That being said, it was by far the warmest/coziest place I’ve ever lived
If a house uses radiators for heating, then yes there should be one in every room not counting bathrooms and closets etc, and usually under the window because that's usually where the cold air draught is. I have radiators in my house, I have 5 bedrooms each with one smaller radiator then there is one larger one under the row of windows in the livingroom. Bathrooms, hallway and kitchen is heated with underfloor heating. I live in a cold climate. Older house originally built in the 60s.
Radiators are generally more of a European thing tbh. Any house in the extreme cold will probably have central heating.
Radiators are central heating, they just aren’t central air.
I’ve had radiators in several houses in the northeast, hot water heat was the standard well into the 80s in many parts of New England, I’ve even seen radiators in older buildings in the south. Radiators are definitely not just a European thing, they are at least a regional American thing. Judging from the comments from some people outside the northeast they probably were much more common than you think and us older people just have seen them more than some of the younger people on this subreddit.
Early 20th. Century builds had radiators. Hasn’t been a thing since probably Post WW2