Comparing heat output?

Flamed Diving

Hello, I am a masters student of Economics and I am trying to come up with an idea for a project. The field is in economic history and I am looking at accurately measuring price changes in goods, over time, while also incorporating quality changes. Now, as you can imagine, the further back you go, the more difficult it becomes. For example, you could begin with a car in the 21st century, but wind up with a horse in the 17th! One way of accounting for this is to generate a variable which draws a straight line between the two (horse power) and then attaching a value to it (dollar-per horse power). Here is a paper that does the same with light, using dollars per lumen-hour, as the variable.

http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p09b/p0957.pdf

Anyway, for my project I would like to do the same thing, except for personal/residential heating. Since I know very little about the various means of comparing a fire to a boiler to a radiator in terms of heating a room/person, I thought you guys would be the best to ask. Is it feasible to compare an open-fire (caveman) to a furnace-boiler (18th century) to a modern radiator/underfloor heating? Is there data/publications on this?

Any help appreciated.

daragh8008

A interesting problem. In isolation I sure that you could compare directly. Ie if you took the absolute energy output per unit of fuel, and weighted it against the cost. (normalised to modern prices) But this doesn’t include anything about efficiency. If one considers that in a cave the log fire would lose a lot of heat due to zero insulation. Moving forward 18th century houses were drafty places. But probably warmer than a cave. Then there is the modern underfloor heating in a well insulated house… But then there is the human factor, ie did the Victorian house keeper think the 25C was a nice warm room or was 18C considered toasty. So there are many different facets to the problem and as a consequence I suspect you’ll have to take a number of parameters a investigate if they are relevant to your investigation. That said if you look to some books on chemical engineering, From what I recall there are some that deal specifically the economics of chemical processing. While not directly related your problem they do address the economics of process heating and you might find some insight there.