Wood boilers would be pretty much unheard of here until the recent craze of wood stoves in the 2000s for decorative reasons. As a fuel wood hasn't ever been common place in Ireland or Britain as there are no serious forests and no history of using it as a fuel since before the industrial revolution.
Historically, heating was done by coal (and even turf in Ireland and Scotland) burnt in ranges and fireplaces with backboilers.
Pre 20th century heating here was done with a fireplace in every room. Even pretty modest homes had fireplaces in very room and they all burnt coal! So you can only imagine what the air quality must have been like in towns and cities in the 1800s!
By the 1950s here a lot of homes (in Ireland anyway, Britian may be different) were built with laundry rooms. The washing machine and dryer usually "live" in the utility room (often off the kitchen) and sometimes in 1940s homes off the yard as a fully separate outhouse. Some houses have laundry appliances in the kitchen but, it's not as common a location as in Britian and it would be relatively unusual in newer homes (post 1950s). Even in apartments it's more likely you'll find a laundry closet than a machine in the kitchen here.
The vast majority of post WWII homes here were heated with gasoil hydronic heating systems using pressure jet burners. They're almost always located in a small shed / boiler house next to the house with pipes actually crossing underground to the house itself! The boiler was a compact washing machine sized device with a full chimney flue, often built as a stand alone stack, but sometimes actually a chimney attached to the house or on a little shed to make it "cute"
The logic of this was to prevent fire risks with older heating systems and also to cut noise as older pressure jet boilers rumble quite a bit. If you've ever heard one operating, it's a very distinctive sound that used to frighten me as kid in suburban Dublin. There was always a door at the back of houses with a big louvered panel, strange clicking noises, lights visible through the door and a big loud rubble very few mins
These days rural homes tend to have a "heat pack" which is a self-contained outdoor boiler. It is housed in a weatherproof, heavily insulated metal box a which is just put in the garden and connected to the house with heavily insulated underground pipes. Typically they have a "frost stat" which will fire the boiler if there's any risk of freezing.
Natural gas only arrived in Ireland in the 1970s when we discovered gas wells odd the south coast and that's when gas fired central heating started to become very popular. In most cases it replaced oil fired boilers but the actual heating systems haven't changed much at all in a very long time.
We've had "town gas" (gasified coal or oil) since the dawn of that technology, but it wasn't generally used for central heating for some reason (possibly too expensive to burn like that).
LPG is also used quite a bit in rural areas for central heating and cooking (and drying sometimes too - you can buy whirlpool and Maytag US style gas dryers here. They're popular enough in larger rural homes. They actually partner very well with a high capacity European washer with a fast spin! Your laundry is dry in no time!
We had a push of electric storage heating for a while in the 69s and 70s but it's extremely inefficient as most of our electricity is generated from natural gas (35% is now wind power though). We from heating is pretty rare nowadays (although it's sometimes installed by cheap landlords renting to students etc because it's cheap to retrofit to old buildings)
Ireland's development patterns are completely out of whack with continental Europe though. We've a preference for large homes, individual houses and quite a bit of spread and space. A lot of rural / outer suburban homes tend to be fairly sprawling and there's tons of "one off" homes on large sites (1/2 acre - 2 acre kind of spaces).
Only 3% of the population lives in apartments and there's actually a bit of a cultural "allergy" to the concept. I'm not sure why, but the aim here is always buy a house, with as much space as possible.
I guess maybe being English speaking we've just got more in common with other anglophone countries when it comes to these things.
The EU regularly spanks us over our "insane" development "plans" but, I think it's a political and democratic choice. We like our space and I've a feeling it goes back to notions of landownership too. History here is little hot & firey when it come to people owning their own land - whole British feudal landlord system was fairly dramatically thrown out in the 19th and early 20th century... So, I think we've very much got a "my home is my castle" mentality and I can't see that ever changing.
There's definitely a strongly individualistic steak though and I don't see it changing!
Amazing though how you can tell a lot about socioeconomic History and politicial attitudes of a country by just looking at the plumbing and laundry habits lol
Compare Ireland : totally individualistic central heating on a per house basis
To Nordic countries : communal efforts in urban areas - district heating.
To Eastern Europe : apartments with district heating.
