Furnace / heater
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I have lived in the Philadelphia area since 1979, and I still can't get used to the fact that people here refer to the thing in your basement that keeps your house warm in fall and winter as a "heater". To me, a heater is something that keeps a single room or a small area within a room warm.
The reason this is on my mind now is because I get my furnace cleaned once a year around this time, but the oil company that cleans it for me always calls that rumbling little monster a heater.
I wonder what folks in other places call that thing in the basement that sends heat throughout the house.
To get the ball rolling, I note that I learned to call it a "furnace" back in northeastern Ohio (specifically presidential bellwether Stark County) during the 40s and 50s.
Bill Benzon said,
October 16, 2015 @ 7:57 pm
I grew up in Johnstown in western PA and we had a furnace in the basement. Originally a coal-fired beast, but then we got a oil burner.
bobbie said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:01 pm
Furnace in New Jersey. Furnace in Virginia — could be a floor furnace or something that is in the attic or basement or in a separate compartment on the main floor. A "space heater" is a portable device that can heat one or two rooms. I lived in Beverly Hills California in 1979 and had a gas something-or-other that blew warm air into the apartment. Cannot remember which it was called.
Clint W said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:10 pm
Northeast Iowa: furnace
Chris C. said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:15 pm
Central New Jersey, where I grew up: Furnace.
Northern California, where I now live: Furnace.
Philly must be just kinda weird this way.
Mark Meckes said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:30 pm
In both southwest and northeast Ohio in recent decades, it's a furnace. Same in central Michigan and northern California.
The other places I've lived I was either too young, or was there too briefly, to be sure what it was called.
Amy de Buitléir said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:32 pm
Los Angeles: heater
Donegal, Dublin: boiler (but the thing that heats water for your shower is called the "immersion").
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:35 pm
I grew up with an oil-burning furnace in the basement. I've owned houses with gas-fired furnaces and with electric central heating. My current condo has a combined HVAC unit.
In my lexicon, "furnace" implies combustion. A device that converts electricity to heat is a heater, no matter how big or what room it's located in. A device that exchanges heat with some external source/sink is a heat pump.
mike said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:44 pm
Grew up in Denver, now live in Seattle: furnace for both
Anschel Schaffer-Cohen said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:57 pm
I'm not sure if I grew up with a generic word for such a thing, but if it heats the house with forced water I'd definitely call it a boiler. I'm from Jersey City, NJ, my parents are both from the New York area although my Dad spent part of his childhood in East Lansing, Michigan.
Lydia said,
October 16, 2015 @ 8:57 pm
Eastern Kansas: It's pretty common to have combined HVAC units for heating and AC, so we call them heaters or maybe heat pumps.
I grew up in a house with a wood-burning furnace in the basement. We'd usually call it either a furnace or a heater. But those HVAC things aren't furnaces, they're heaters.
Mark S said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:15 pm
In the UK, a "furnace" means an industrial device, such a blast furnace.
Jonathon Owen said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:17 pm
It's a furnace for me too. Heater would make me think of something that heats a single room, but I'd generally call that a space heater, not just heater. And I'm from Utah, for what it's worth.
Jim Breen said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:33 pm
Heater for me (Melbourne, Australia). Furnace sounds industrial.
Larry Sheldon said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:35 pm
Winter time — "furnace"
Summer time — "air conditioning" ("air conditioner" hangs in a window)
I'm old school computer room –"air handler", probably has a mix of modules from the set "heat", "reheat", "humidifier", "chiller", "filter".
Larry Sheldon said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:40 pm
When I was a kid–we had (if we were lucky) heaters or fireplaces or ovens or wood-burning ranges.
The heaters were often strange ceramic thinks–gas fired with a million little bumps that growed red and produce "medium rare" on little kids in an instant.
Larry Sheldon said,
October 16, 2015 @ 9:41 pm
…glowed red and produced…
Kevin G said,
October 16, 2015 @ 10:51 pm
South east England:
'Heater' just heats up a room, typically portable
'Fire' as in 'gas fire' or 'electric fire' just heats up a room, often fitted (especially if gas)
'Furnace' is something industrial, generating huge temperatures
'Boiler' generates & distributes heat for your home or larger building
'Immersion heater' is a tank of water with an electric heating element, providing hot water for shower etc.
'Stove' is for cooking food, but a 'wood-burning stove' is just for heating
Michael C Dunn said,
October 16, 2015 @ 11:06 pm
Grew up in Missouri Ozarks. Now in Northern VA suburbs of DC. Furnace in both places. U lived in Cairo twice but only had space heaters for winter.
Laura Morland said,
October 16, 2015 @ 11:07 pm
I agree with the other two respondents who reported that we say "furnace" here in Northern California. I grew up in Central Florida, though, and the word used there is… NOTHING!
In Central Florida there are no basements (water table too high), and no furnaces either (no need ;-).
Ken Miner said,
October 16, 2015 @ 11:19 pm
Echoing former comment: Philly must be just kinda weird this way. I've lived in Upstate NY, NYC, Florida, Nebraska, northern Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Eastern Kansas, and never heard a furnace called a heater. The thing that heats your water, that's a heater. And since it's usually right next to the furnace, maybe that's the source of the transfer in Philly.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 16, 2015 @ 11:57 pm
"Furnace" in Cuyahoga Co., Ohio (hardly likely to differ from Stark Co.) and in northern New Mexico. As far as I know, a "boiler" in America has to boil water, and not for tea. My elementary school had something called a boiler in some invisible place; I suppose it supplied steam to the radiators.
A heater, in my childhood in Ohio, was a louvered vent that hot air from the furnace came out of. Also "register".
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 17, 2015 @ 12:02 am
A question for Northerners who call that thing in the basement a furnace:
Suppose you're renting a vacation home in Southern California and there is no thing in the basement; there's a thing of a rather different sort on a slab out back of the garage. Would you still call it a furnace?
In other words, is furnace a generic term for a large thing that supplies heat? Or is it a particular kind of thing, and it just so happens that where you live, the vast majority of heating appliances are of the kind called furnace?
Tye said,
October 17, 2015 @ 12:23 am
In the late 70s we would go visit Uncle Harry in his old house on Whidbey Island, Washington. He had a big *furnace* in his living room. I work in an old (built in 1935) elementary school in Skagit County, Washington. The maintenance guys talk about firing up the *boiler* to heat the building. Recent district communication about HVAC issues revealed that all the buildings, new or old, have *boilers*.
Laura Morland said,
October 17, 2015 @ 12:28 am
@Gregory Kusnick —
Does that "thing of a rather different sort on a slab out back of the garage" transmit chilled air into the house? In Florida we call that the "A/C Unit" which incidentally provides heat for the brief time it's needed. (It may technically be called an "HVAC Unit," but I've never heard the term used in ordinary speech.)
On the other hand, I found this page useful: http://www.housetweaking.com/2011/11/18/mechanicalities/ where the object you describe is referred to as a "heat pump" (and one of the commenters even spells it "heatpump").
Laura Morland said,
October 17, 2015 @ 12:34 am
Back to the original question: I just asked my husband what he calls the thing we installed 15 years ago in our attic here in Berkeley that provides heat to the house. He at first thought I was suffering from some kind of aphasia, but eventually responded "it's a furnace."
"Even though it's located in the attic?" I inquired.
"It's a furnace," he repeated.
(For the record, he grew up in Wayne County, Ohio.)
I agree with Gregory Kusnick that the word " 'furnace' implies combustion," but our unit is powered by natural gas (for the heat) and electricity (for distributing it around the house.
DPickering said,
October 17, 2015 @ 12:50 am
Seattle in the 50's furnace
Catherine said,
October 17, 2015 @ 1:42 am
When referring to the "furnace" in the basement, I use furnace and heater interchangeably. Heater is more general, though; I would use it interchangeably with space heater as well, but I would never call a space heater a furnace.
I'm located in Alberta, Canada.
Martin Ball said,
October 17, 2015 @ 2:02 am
We have a 'värmepump' or 'heat pump' here in Sweden. But is a geo-thermal system!
Michael Moszczynski said,
October 17, 2015 @ 2:48 am
From Toronto. I would call the one that heats the whole house a _heater_, and the one that heats one room a _space heater_.
January First-of-May said,
October 17, 2015 @ 3:52 am
I also agree that a "furnace" is something that belongs in an engine, and generally associated with temperatures much higher than those applicable to room heating (nobody wants their room heated to above the boiling point of water). As for "boiler", perhaps by weird confusion with my first language, I associate that word with small objects that are put in the water and heat it electrically (apparently the correct English is "immersion heater").
In my native Russian (Moscow City), the word for a room heater (typically near a wall, works by something to do with hot water) is батарея (literally "battery", same word as the sort of battery you get in electronic devices). Apparently the English word is "radiator".
I'm not sure whether it can refer to other shapes of room heaters, though, since this one is by far the most common; stoves/ovens and AC systems have their own words (печь and кондиционер respectively, though the latter is rarely used for heating), and the heating system in general is отопление (pretty much literally "heating").
Laura Morland said,
October 17, 2015 @ 4:52 am
@ January First-of-May,
It seems that "furnace" for a home heating system is restricted to U.S. usage. Even the Canadians seem to use another word, perhaps closer to your feeling.
I'm interested, however, that "stoves/ovens and AC systems have their own words (печь and кондиционер respectively, though the latter is rarely used for heating)"
I see that Russian uses the "conditioner" part of "air-conditioner" to refer to A/C! I find that sweetly amusing….
John Roth said,
October 17, 2015 @ 6:49 am
Grew up in Chicago – it was a furnace feeding a baseboard air system. Too young to remember what we called the system with radiators. However, I'm with whoever said that a furnace has to burn something; I don't think I'd call electrical heat a furnace, regardless of the heat distribution system.
CP Brown said,
October 17, 2015 @ 7:14 am
A furnace heats up air in a plenum. That's forced air heat.
If you have radiators, you have a boiler, not a furnace, anyway.
Steve R said,
October 17, 2015 @ 7:23 am
In the San Francisco area (where such a thing would generally be in the garage or a utility closet because basements are unheard of), furnace is a stuffy/formal word. You might call a furnace repair service, but in common speech you (and everyone else) would call it a heater.
T Stein said,
October 17, 2015 @ 7:27 am
In the Northeast, or at least around Boston, a furnace is also called a boiler (though strictly speaking a boiler is just part of a furnace). Maybe that's because of the early Irish immigration (as someone pointed out above, that's what they call it in Dublin). If you don't have heat on a cold winter day, you would probably say "go check the boiler" rather than "go check the furnace."
BlueLoom said,
October 17, 2015 @ 8:16 am
Grew up in Washington, DC. We had steam-heated radiators, and we called the monster in the basement that produced the heat a "furnace." It was oil-fed, except during WW II, when oil was scarce and we used coal (had to feed the beast several times per day).
Now live in N. Virginia. Still call it a furnace, tho from reading the comments it's probably some kind of heater: gas fired, forced hot air.
Ralph Hickok said,
October 17, 2015 @ 8:17 am
I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin 1938-1955, where most people had coal-fired furnaces in the basement (never cellar) but some people, including my paternal grandparents, had kerosene-burning heaters in some rooms. (Typically, houses that relied on heaters did not have basements at all.)
I've basically been in Massachusetts for the last 60+ years. Most people have gas furnaces or oil burners in their cellars. The apartment house in which I live has a gas furnace in the cellar, but two of our rooms have electric heating systems and my office (a converted screen porch) has a space heater that burns gas.
Adrian Morgan said,
October 17, 2015 @ 8:29 am
Related: an American friend once insisted that the term "air conditioning" refers to cooling only, and not to heating.
Nonsense, said I. An air conditioner is (prototypically) a device with a thermostat and a fan. Whether heating or cooling, it is conditioning the air.
Does anyone else use "air conditioning" only in reference to cooling, or is my friend just weird?
Anyway, I (in Australia) heat my home with an air conditioner, opening and closing doors to direct the warm air to the rooms where it is needed. The air conditioner itself is located in the living room.
unekdoud said,
October 17, 2015 @ 8:47 am
Singapore (where the temperature is so warm that nobody owns such a device): I'd say the thing in the basement is a heater, and the room-heater is called a radiator, but if you mention 'heater' in casual conversation it means you're going to take a hot shower. Neither 'furnace' nor 'boiler' would belong in the house.
Bill Benzon said,
October 17, 2015 @ 9:00 am
Yes, "boiler" for industrial-sized furnaces that heat large buildings, or a college campus. I'm thinking of Johns Hopkins when I was there in the 60s. The powerhouse had large boilers that supplied heat to the campus, I suspect mostly to buildings built before a certain date but don't really know.
As for "heater", in certain kinds of movies it's applied to a hand-held device that's also called a "gat" by tough guys in chalk-striped suits wearing wide-brim fedoras above their smashed noses.
Levantine said,
October 17, 2015 @ 9:12 am
Adrian Morgan, you may be technically right, but I agree with your friend: "air conditioning" for me refers only to cooling, and I've never heard anyone use it for heating.
Eric P Smith said,
October 17, 2015 @ 9:14 am
Scotland and north-east England: exactly as Kevin G said.
David L said,
October 17, 2015 @ 9:40 am
@Adrian Morgan: the term of art in the US is HVAC — heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems. The AC part typically refers not just to cooling but to dehumidifying. Traditionally, heating was heat alone, but in modern energy-efficient buildings, especially commercial offices and apartment buildings, you have to include conditioning along with heating, because the buildings are so highly sealed — ventilation has to be designed into them, and humidity levels have to be controlled in winter and summer.
Even the people who repair domestic systems often advertise themselves as HVAC contractors.
David L said,
October 17, 2015 @ 9:45 am
And somewhat off-topic: I know an older woman who asks if you want fresh, hot coffee to augment your half-consumed, cooled-off portion by saying "would you like a heater?"
Bathrobe said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:01 am
For me, an air-conditioner is something that cools the air. I'm aware that you can cool your room with an air-conditioner, but by default air-conditioning refers to cooling.
In Japan, kerosene (paraffin) heaters and other kinds of heater (including, I think, the gas-heaters that are used in cold places) are called ストーブ sutōbu, from English 'stove'.
Bathrobe said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:01 am
I'm aware that you can warm your room with an air-conditioner…
John said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:01 am
South-east England: I suppose we'd use "heater" as a kind of umbrella term for all electric devices, but often they're named by analogy with some non-electric heating implement:
If it's a flat thing affixed to the wall, it's a "radiator" whether it's electric or hot-water (fed by a "boiler"). If it's an open-faced red glowing thing under the mantelpiece, it's a "fire" whether it's electric or, y'know, actually combusts gas or solid fuel.
A lot of older houses (or wealthier ones, since they're rather fashionable) would be heated by a "stove", whether that refers to the big cooking thing in the kitchen (also called a "range (cooker)", usually wood- or oil-fired), or an enclosed fireplace with a door (which, again, come in ersatz electric versions with flickering orange light-shows. British people never want it to be obvious to the casual observer that we have electric heating, apparently).
Joel Murray said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:19 am
I'm Canadian and I've lived in Moncton, NB and Vancouver, BC. The word we used in both locations is "furnace." Companies advertise "furnace cleaning" and "furnace tune-ups."
"Heater" implies something small and electrical that provides warmth to a room.
Miles Archer said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:40 am
Northern California. We called it a furnace when I lived in a house with one. The wall heater that's in my current house is a heater.
Mostly we just open and close windows for temperature control.
aka_darrell said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:43 am
40 years ago in Phoenix a popular appliance was called a 'heat pump' and both heating and cooling. I vaguely recall some older houses were heated by a 'heater' installed in a wall between two rooms.
Ellen K. said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:47 am
It could be either, but if I want to specify that rather than the heat pump, I'd say furnace.
Air conditioning only refers to cooling for me. And since air conditioners are the only kinds of cooling units around here, air conditioning is synonymous with cooling indoor air.
Units that both cool and heat air are called heat pumps, when talking about heating, or both heating and cooling, and only called air conditioners when referring to cooling only.
Grew up in the St. Louis metro, now live in the KC metro. (Missouri and Kansas, USA)
Brian Ogilvie said,
October 17, 2015 @ 10:50 am
I grew up in southwestern Michigan in the '70s and '80s. The thing in our basement that heated the house, whether forced water baseboard or forced hot air, was a "furnace." In college, at the University of Chicago, my dorm was heated by a "boiler" that produced steam for the radiators, as was the apartment in which I lived as a grad student (also in Chicago). When I was an exchange student in England, my room had a "heater." Now I live in western Massachusetts, where my house has what I call a "furnace" and the heating company calls a "boiler." I have forced hot water heating; I'm not sure what they would call a furnace that drives a forced hot air system.
I too would call a small portable unit a "space heater."
@CP Brown: Where do you live?
bratschegirl said,
October 17, 2015 @ 11:37 am
SF Bay Area of Northern California: I've always heard the whole-house heating device referred to as a furnace around here. But in speaking of its actual use, it's always "turn on/off/up/down the heat." I'd say that I needed to have the furnace serviced or repaired or replaced, but I'd never say that since I was cold I was going to turn on or turn up the furnace.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 17, 2015 @ 11:59 am
I call the thing in my house (just north of the NYC city limits) a furnace (gas-fired, heats up some sort of non-water liquid in copper tubing that then circulates to provide heat in turn for various forced-air units located in various places around the house). It's not in the basement because my house (unusually for the area) lacks one; it's in a small room next to the garage that also has the hot-water heater and the washer and dryer – I think in our household dialect we call it interchangeably both the furnace room and the laundry room (the latter is salient because you're most likely to go in there to do laundry but the former is salient because during heating season it is markedly warmer than any other room in the house, and is e.g. where the kids hang up clothes that have gotten cold and wet from playing in the snow so as to make them warm and dry as speedily as possible).
I do think that there is actual combustion going on is part of the basic semantics of "furnace" for me. I've never lived in a house where there was a main central unit from which heat was distributed but the heating in that unit was all done by electricity, and I lack a good intuition for what I'd call such a unit; "furnace" feels wrong but I don't know what the right substitute is.
Norman Smith said,
October 17, 2015 @ 1:03 pm
Grew up in South-Western Ontario, living in Ottawa (Eastern Ontario): The term would be "furnace" in both places. In my experience, "heater" is only ever used for something that is localized, like a space heater, of something to heat water, but not a whole house. When I search online for "furnace cleaning Ottawa", I get a lot of results citing furnace cleaning. When I search for "heater cleaning Ottawa", I get the same set of results, describing themselves as furnace cleaning services.
CraigF said,
October 17, 2015 @ 1:32 pm
Does it sound strange to anyone to call the air conditioning, whether in the car or in the home, the "air con?" As in, "can you turn on the air con, it's sweltering?" My family and I use it all the time (Metro Minnesota) but to my girlfriend and her family (Door County, WI), it is strange enough to get a comment every time I use it (even though they understand perfectly well what I mean).
CraigF said,
October 17, 2015 @ 1:32 pm
I add that they will only abbreviate it "A.C."
r said,
October 17, 2015 @ 2:32 pm
Furnace in the cellar, heater or radiator in the rooms. Connecticut native.
Xtifr said,
October 17, 2015 @ 3:29 pm
Also from the SF bay area, and bratschegirl's experience exactly matches mine. The word "furnace" is only used with respect to the actual physical thing in the basement (or wherever). The room thermostat controls "the heat".
I'll add that a heating device in the room with you is called a heater, and you can speak of turning on the heater as well as turning on the heat, but you never talk about turning on the furnace unless the device in the basement is actually shut down and needs a manual restart or something.
The word radiator is used almost exclusively for water-based heating devices.
Mark F. said,
October 17, 2015 @ 3:49 pm
When I was a kid in NC, we had a gas furnace, but now I have a heat pump. There is no component of the heat pump that I would call a furnace. Like Xtifr, "the heat" is what I control with the thermostat.
Even though we did call it a furnace, calling it a heater didn't seem totally wrong.
The in-room thing I usually call a space heater, not just a heater.
Ellen K said,
October 17, 2015 @ 4:53 pm
@CraigF
Air Con definitely is not something I've heard. Though sometimes it's abbreviated to just "the air".
Vance Koven said,
October 17, 2015 @ 5:05 pm
Reinforcing GP Brown and T Stein, here in Boston it's a boiler if your system is either steam or forced hot water, and a furnace if it's forced hot air. The two rooms on the attic floor of my house, which are off the central heating system, have electric heaters (baseboard), and supplemental single-room warmers are either heaters or, for the real thing, fireplaces. Air conditioning (digression: I know foreign-raised people who habitually call it "air condition," and I forcibly suppress the urge to ask them what condition their air is in) is cooling only; electric ductless things that both heat and cool are heat pumps, or just "ductless."
chuck said,
October 17, 2015 @ 5:46 pm
Phoenix Arizona:
Homes come with heat pumps. Air conditioning means cooling only and is abbreviated AC (not air con). For heating one says "the heat" though the device might be called "the heater" or heat pump or perhaps even "the AC unit." I guess we call AC repair to fix a problem with the heat. Furnace connotes industrial use.
TonyK said,
October 17, 2015 @ 6:35 pm
63 comments! That's somehow disturbing.
Laura Morland said,
October 17, 2015 @ 6:53 pm
@ TonyK — Why do you find 63 comments "disturbing" for this post? The OP asked for examples from different parts of the country (or English-speaking world, and so folks feel welcome to chime in.
@ Chuck — In Florida, too, one would call the "A/C repair" to fix the heat, because it's the same unit.
Re: "Air Con" — it sounds weird to me,too. I come from a part of the U.S. where air conditioning is used over 10 months a year, and everyone calls it "A/C" (although some may spell it differently).
Anubis Bard said,
October 17, 2015 @ 7:05 pm
Growing up in Lancaster County, PA, (70 miles west of Philadelphia) I grew up calling it a heater. My grandmother in the Poconos called hers a furnace, and at some point I switched to that word. When I moved to Rhode Island I had to learn to call ours a boiler. Since it's a forced hot water system, they won't refer to it as a furnace.
Victor Mair said,
October 17, 2015 @ 11:24 pm
@TonyK
I find the 66 (now) comments illuminating and reassuring — showing the variety of ways in which the thing that heats your house is referred to and the generous willingness of Language Log readers to report them.
julie lee said,
October 17, 2015 @ 11:35 pm
In our house in Michigan we had it in our basement, a furnace or boiler. I never figured out how the two were related. It was a Mystery—and a Worry, because mysterious. Once or twice we had someone come and fix it, and then what a relief ! Later, in an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Mystery was in a closet in the garage, and again, I thought it was referred to as the boiler or the furnace. And now in a house in North California, it is in a closet in the bathroom and called a furnace. I regard it with fear, and have never taken a good look at it.
C Baker said,
October 18, 2015 @ 1:13 am
Furnace or boiler for the thing that heats the whole house – we called it a boiler until we went on gas heat instead of oil, at which point we seem to have switched to calling it a furnace, but I'm not sure why. (We also stopped saying sofa and started saying couch as I grew up, and again, I don't know why.)
The thing that heats your room is a *radiator* if it's part of your room, and a *heater* if it's not.
Air conditioning is what cools your house and also helps keep the humidity down – here in NYC, it's very humid (muggy) in the summer.
Levantine said,
October 18, 2015 @ 8:36 am
CraigF, I have heard, and sometimes use, "air con"; it sounds perfectly OK to me. (I'm a Londoner.)
Andrea Nini said,
October 18, 2015 @ 1:51 pm
This is a map for the word "furnace" made using a corpus of about 10 billion words from Twitter collected in 2014:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0wzf2vdi7nzn1vf/furnace.png?dl=0
Bill said,
October 18, 2015 @ 2:15 pm
From northern Illinois but now located in Ecuador, I have recently that recently car dealers are referring to air conditioning (aire condicionado) as heating/cooling or just heating. Perhaps they are trying to impress innocent buyers.
In homes there are no basements, cellars, crawl spaces, furnaces, boilers, radiators, or heaters. However, portable electric or L.P. gas room heaters are gaining popularity in cities above 9,000 feet.
A fireplace is called a "chiminea" (chimney), and I have yet to hear a distinct word for the secure place where a fire is built inside of the house. "Fogón" refers to any purposely-built fire used for heating or cooking, inside or outside of a building, whether contained by a structure with a system for exhausting the smoke or simply built in a corner of the room, blackening both the ceiling and the lungs of the occupants, smoke escaping through the tile roof.
Bill said,
October 18, 2015 @ 2:16 pm
"I have recently heard that"
And this after proofreading!
Lawrence said,
October 18, 2015 @ 5:13 pm
I find myself surprised to realise that I simply don't refer to whatever system heats my home. I can identify by sight "the AC" (which is outside and whirrs) and "the hot water heater" (which is a metal cylindrical contraption that likes to hide in small rooms and trick me into thinking it is a closet), but I have only once seen something I identified as "a furnace," and it was a cast-iron behemoth in the basement of a Victorian home. If pressed, I would guess that my heat has come from HVAC units, or furnaces/boilers (which seem like synonyms?), but these would be types of specific devices, rather than a general term.
I suppose this is the non-homeowner's blissful alienation from the systems that support modern life — I interact only with the thermostat (or, in one residence, the radiator), which (even in the case of the radiator!) operated "the heat," whatever "the heat" may be.
"The heat" has warmed me through Kansas, Ontario, North Carolina, and British Columbia.
empty said,
October 18, 2015 @ 8:24 pm
As Lawrence mentioned, the thing that heats the water supply for the whole house (for sinks and bathtubs and showers and washing machines), as opposed to the thing that heats water to heat the house, is sometimes called by the charmingly redundant name "hot water heater".
Craig said,
October 18, 2015 @ 8:40 pm
Native of Wilmington, DE (about 30 miles south of Philadelphia), I grew up with it as the "heater", but we very well knew that that wasn't the same item as the "water heater".
I asked my mother, who is in her seventies and who also refers to it as a "heater", what she thought of the word "furnace". For her, a "furnace" is specifically a *coal* furnace. She said a furnace made her think of the 1920s when all the houses would have been heated by large coal-fired furnaces which were on the way out by her childhood in the 1950s.
I suspect that the term "heater" for Philadelphians once evoked something smaller and possibly more modern than the older coal furnaces and that the term simply became stuck in the area.
John Swindle said,
October 18, 2015 @ 11:15 pm
From mid-Kansas in the 1950s I recall coal furnaces converted to natural gas and not always correctly vented. It wouldn't have been wrong to call them heaters, but heavy-duty things that heated whole houses were specifically furnaces. Ugly, hot things that stood near the walls of rooms and maybe occasionally hissed or clanked, with snowy-wet outerwear hung on them, were radiators. Electric central heating wasn't yet common, so I didn't have vocabulary for that.
Chas Belov said,
October 19, 2015 @ 3:10 am
I've lived in Philly, Pittsburgh, and Hartford many years ago and now San Francisco. What I have now I call a floor heater. I think anything I had before that was a furnace. I call Air Conditioning just that.
Anthea Fleming said,
October 19, 2015 @ 4:40 am
In Australia the air-conditioner is often described as reverse-cycle; I believe this means it is supposed to warm or cool you, as required. Those I have encountered in motels are seldom enthusiastic at warming, and may be supplemented, when the management decides it really is winter, with hot-water radiators attached to the wall. Presumably some kind of service-room heater or boiler provides the hot water.
At any rate, the word "air-conditioner" is often pronounced "egg-nishner".
Lars said,
October 19, 2015 @ 5:47 am
I know this wasn't the question, but in Danish the oil/gas/wood/straw-burning thing in the cellar / wash room is called 'fyr' (neuter) — cognate with E fire, of course, but lost after ON and re-borrowed in this specialized sense (also 'lighthouse', as a verb 'fire a gun') from MLG vur.
Mike said,
October 19, 2015 @ 6:51 pm
I grew up in NYC; we had radiators in the apartment. I don't recall ever having a term for the steam-to-water heat exchanger in the basement; the steam at the time being waste steam from Con Edison's generating plants piped through the city. Heaters, as mentioned were for heating small spaces, whether freestanding or wall mounted in the bathrooms. I now live in the Boston area, and have a boiler in the basement (gas fired, circulating hot water), and heater still refers to little plug-in space heaters. I use furnace for both hot-air heating systems and for the things that melt metal for casting.
Brad said,
October 19, 2015 @ 7:02 pm
I believe that we've always had gas fired forced air systems in the houses I've lived in. We called the box in the basement which burned the gas, exchanged heat and had a blower motor a 'furnace'.
I would call the heating unit for a water or steam system a 'boiler', probably regardless of the temperature or liquid going through it.
The domestic potable water was heated by a 'hot water heater' whether that was gas or electric.
Ralph Hickok said,
October 19, 2015 @ 7:07 pm
I remember being told that tank in the basement was a hot water heater and saying it should be called a cold water heater because hot water doesn't need heating.
I guess I've always been a smart alec :)
Mark Mandel said,
October 19, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
Adrian Morgan, I also use "air conditioner" only for a cooling/dehumidifying machine or system; in the car, it's "the air conditioning".
I grew up in NYC, went to grad school in Berkeley, then to the Boston area for 20 years, and have now lived about 13 years in Philadelphia.
I've never been totally clear about
that big thing in the basement that burns oil/gas to heat air to warm the house
in contrast to
that other big thing in the basement/garage that burns oil/gas to heat water for the sinks and bathtub.
I think I'd tend to call the latter, but not the former, a boiler because of the association of "boil" with heating water. The former, then, a furnace … probably. And reading the manuals doesn't help Mr. Ten-thumbs here.
A heater is pretty definitely one of those various smaller things, almost always portable, that you use to heat a room. Often "space heater", "radiant heater", sometimes I guess "convection heater" to specify the … physics involved.
AmyP said,
October 20, 2015 @ 6:14 am
Grew up outside of Philly (with Pennsylvania parents) and we mostly called it a furnace with maybe an occasional reference to the heater. When I moved to New York City and Boston, it became the boiler.
Keith said,
October 21, 2015 @ 6:18 am
When I was living in northern New Jersey, everybody referred to the big gas-burning unit in the basement as a "furnace". It definitely made a noise like an industrial furnace or kiln when is was running. In my house, it was used to heat air that was then blown through the house. Meaning that in a power cut, the gas-fired heating would not work. :rolleyes: The furnace also provided hot water, I think.
In the UK it is called a boiler because it heats (though not to boiling point) the hot water that then runs through pipes to radiators.
Here in France, I have an oil burning machine called a 'chaudière' (a little aside: this is the origin of the word 'chowder', in the sense of 'caldron' or cooking pot) that is the equivalent of a boiler, providing hot water for washing and for the radiators.
Darryl Shpak said,
October 22, 2015 @ 12:30 pm
Winnipeg, Manitoba: definitely "furnace" for a forced-air central heating system, which is by far the most common type here. For a forced-water system I'd lean towards "boiler", but I've never had one and am unsure what they're normally called.
The big device for heating water for showers and so forth is the "hot water tank" (whether it runs on natural gas or electricity).
A small electric device for heating air in a room is a "space heater".
For cooling the house, you have a "window air conditioner" (for one room) or "central air" (for the whole house, with a forced-air system). The latter could be "central air conditioner" too but the abbreviated form is more common. Either type of device will be casually referred to as "A/C" or "the air" (as in, "It's getting hot, we should turn on the air.")
Greg Morrow said,
October 23, 2015 @ 12:11 pm
Central Kentucky.
Pretty sure we called it heater or furnace interchangeably. As others have noted, the little portable things you use to heat up an area are "space heaters" — the modifier is required to distinguish them from core "heaters", which are the house-heating things in the basement.
Marta K said,
October 25, 2015 @ 7:19 pm
I grew up in Philly and have always called it a furnace. Never heard it called anything else till I had to move to AL and then GA.
Lisa R-R said,
October 27, 2015 @ 7:14 am
Another vote for furnace from Toronto!
(I don't know anyone here who says "heater" for anything other than an electric portable "space heater" for a room.)
My mother's house here has radiators with a boiler but she still refers to the furnace in the basement.
Agreed on the "furnace cleaning" services here as well.