The original version of our house was tiny – only slightly larger than the minimum size allowed in the city plan – so it wasn’t especially difficult to heat, despite not having double-glazed windows (a major mistake) and having cathedral ceilings.
When our house was built, night-store heaters were the go. These contained heavy heat-retention bricks, made of some ferrous substance, which were heated with cheap night-rate electricity. The heat was released in a controlled manner during the day. One drawback of these heaters is that they are surprisingly expensive to install; another is that, all too often, they are heating a room that, because of unexpected warm weather, doesn’t need heating. So, you quite often pay for heating that isn’t required. Yet another drawback is that, in a large earthquake, the hot, heavy heaters can fall over – as ours did in the 2010 Christchurch earthquake, luckily not starting a
