Also, as made famous by the many steam vents in NYC movie shots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#United_States
I never heard if anyone got hurt when I took a day off and slept in.
Yikes, that's tough. In my city, the cold water pipes are buried close enough to the surface and the brutal sun that it comes out of the tap about 27-29c during the day.
It's still pretty damn hot of course but I've never had any problems like you described, and I've lived in a dozen different houses in my city - all with district heating. Probably the system in the dormitory was somehow badly designed or incorrectly tuned.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/germany/leipzig/climate
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/moscow/climate
though Moscow gets rather more snow
Not all sidewalks are heated. It’s more like they paved the top of the service vaults.
I don’t recall this problem specifically but the university employs a lot of students and alums.
In finnish, the term is ”kaukolämpö”, literally ”far heat”.
You dont heat a ”district”, you heat the entire city. I mean, electricity wires go everywhere, why not heating pipes.
And so the network for Helsinki looks like this: https://twitter.com/energiahelen/status/1511998227008176129?...
The red lines is the heat pipe network, it covers the entire city.
When Americans talk about ”district heating” they miss the scope of the thing.
We actually do pipe some stuff around and it flows from one place to another.
Is the series of tubes so hilariously unimaginable for Americans?
Huh, neat.
I know it's hard to develop actual efficient solutions due to the cost of buying land, creating new infra. So you go for the cost efficient route instead of the practical efficiency.
I think that's mostly due to the high upkeep costs of the system, though, the transmission loss is quite manageable, I think. Of course there are arguments to be made that when accounting for the cost of installing a heating system, and the space it takes, the premium paid for district heating is not that high.
But still... if district heating is so smart, why ain't it cheaper?
What's nice about it, and maybe hard to quantify, is how this limits air pollution in the city. However, people are still allowed wood burning ovens... which they are now all turning to since the district heat is getting really, really expensive..
It should be simple to quantify. If gas is used for heating I can't think there would be any improvement.
Local heating with a heatpump would be an improvement if the power supply mix is greener than gas only, maybe worse if the power is all coal.
https://celsiuscity.eu/district-heating-prices-highly-compet...
This comes with some perverse incentives in an age of renewables:
1. If the power plants use surplus electricity to provide district heating it is no longer a "waste product" and consequently taxed. Since the power plant cannot run without generating electricity, this leads to periods of negative power prices.
2. Cooling water from e.g. data centers is too cold for district heating, but it would be energy efficient to use heat pumps to extract that energy. This is not done, because the product would be subject to full energy taxes as it is not a waste product.
So, in America, it is very common for hot water tanks to suddenly fail, leaking water everywhere and causing massive amounts of property damage and even creating health hazards through mold.
In a not-insane world, all hot water tanks would come with moisture meters (you can buy them at the hardware store, $20 maybe) that would alert when the tank started to fail. But no, instead, American's are just accustom to the idea that about every 10-15 years, they will have to fix some large amount of water damage.
The condo complex I used to live in had a huge line item for water damage very year, insurance companies charge a large deductible because they know the damage is going to happen. Recently the condo association has taken to enforcing manual inspections of hot water heaters and requires they be replaced after 10 years, due to the large number of insurance claims that were being made.
(I did suggest they just enforce the use of moisture detectors...)
Oh and in condos, the hot water tanks are supposed to be hooked up to a drain so this flooding isn't an issue. But, well, apparently most of them were not hooked up properly. :/
FWIW I've seen this same issue in multiple places I've lived, apartment complexes have issues with hot water tanks going out all the time.
So anyway, my point is, Americans are really bad at moving hot water around.
Hot water heaters should have leak detectors on them. They often don't. The higher end models do. Product differentiation strikes again.
Last water heater I had, the anode was A-OK, I had it checked about a year prior to the water heater failing.
Thermal stress destroys stuff.
They also don't repair damage. A really mean thing to do would be to replace the anode on a nearly-dead water heater right before selling a house. The minute the anode finishes rusting away, the heater could let go.
Curious what sort of load you put on yours to have such terrible luck.
ex. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Battery-Operat...
This doesn't help for catastrophic failures but for leaks it should.
Something’s wrong here. I’ve only seen 1 partial failure (a refrigerant leak reduced efficiency by 5x, but the AC still worked) in the last 15 years across several houses. You’ve got an order of magnitude more failures.
Do you live on a boat? :P
My current house's HVAC system was also done piss poorly in places and there can be a 15 degree difference between rooms, so that's going to be 10k+ to fix. Fun times.
[1]Despite the obscene maintenance costs, the luxury is worth it. Warm floors are really nice!
America moves hot water just fine.
EDIT: yes water heaters can fail. Usually due to bad install, people store stuff on the pipes or on top of the unit treating the mechanical closet like a utility storage closet for brooms vacuum ironing board stuffed in, or subjected to a freeze. Nothing wrong with the device itself, everything to do with improper install or maintenance.
I've told about a dozen people in my life that leak detectors were a thing, and they were all shocked at the info. From what I gather, their existence is not common knowledge.
> Still, water heaters get a drain pan to catch leaks.
Initial leaks yes, but eventually hot water heats fail in a dramatic fashion and spew water everywhere.
> Your condo may have been a bad install or not installed to code.
Literally every apartment complex I've lived in has had this same issue. The apartment complex's my friends live in, same issue. I figure that commercially ran complexes would be motivated to install leak detectors, but apparently not.
> Hot water heaters should last a lot longer, and when they fail it’s probably a faulty thermostat or short.
Should, sure. The warranty is 10 years on higher end models, and the last ($2000!) water heater I had fail on me failed at 9 years and 6 months.
I've seen older hot water heaters, sure, but the expectation is failure after 10 years. All the plumbers I've ever talked to have repeated exactly that. They also say that a large # of tankless units they have seen encounter motor failures after 10 years and also have to be replaced.
You seriously need to tell your condo association to get their maintenance people to flush the water heaters regularly (seasonally or annually) and check/change the anodes. If they're gas-fired heaters, the burner and air intakes should be getting cleaned.
If this isn't being done, it's probably because your maintenance is being done by plumbers, who have convinced everyone that "they just fail, you know?"
Replacing a tankless water heater because the motor has failed is silly. You replace the motor. And tankless heaters don't fail very often unless, again, they don't see regular maintenance. As in: flush/descale annually and water/air filter cleanings.
2) anodes stop heavy corrosion in the system by sacrificing themselves.
But I think there must be a regional difference. Maybe hot water tanks fail more depending on the climate or water acidity or something...
Kinda seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy or one could even say planned obsolescence.
I don't really get how you can extract a conspiracy out of something lasting as long as the manufacturer expected it to last.
It is an accurate estimate, done to increase sales.
There’s a slightly more expensive variant from another company that supposedly looks at flow for the whole house, and cuts water off due to slow leaks or burst pipes.
I’m shocked that the water heater cutoff valve isn’t required by code. In contrast, plumbed drain lines for water tank flushing have a much worse payoff per dollar and are required by code around here. (When I’m feeling cynical, I assume that the codes here are designed to subsidize contractors while maximally screwing over home owners.)
Edit: the plumbed lines don’t actually help with leaks; so they do nothing that a garden hose would not accomplish.
Oh I know, they are awesome. They should come standard, and more people should know about them. It is one of those things I try to bring up in conversations at random, because holy crap the # of people I know who have had water damage from their water heating dramatically failing is too high. Heck it happened to my family twice while I was growing up.
> the plumbed lines don’t actually help with leaks; so they do nothing that a garden hose would not accomplish.
Why not? I've seen places where with a drip pan angled towards a hole connects to a pipe that drains outside.
It should work for slow leaks. Doesn't do anything if the tank bursts of course...
On a side note, it seems like a very bad design choice to have that place be the room where all the electrical meters are. However even where there were large puddles of water over the floor it didn't cause any issues.
I've had them fail and leak many times. But I had the water heater put in the basement next to a floor drain, and the floor slopes slightly towards the drain. No damage whatsoever from leaks, and it wasn't an emergency to get it fixed, either.
It's stupid simple and cheap to do this, I dunno why I've never seen any other dwelling with such a setup. My house has a number of things like this, making it cheap to maintain.
P.S. I'm an American.
When I was a baby we lived in my aunt's basement for a few months and the water heater flooded the basement and my mom swore she would never live in the same house as one of those again.
A good idea, but not sure it it’s code, is to do the same with the clothes washer.
Flood sensors (there are ones with auto water shutoffs too) for the clothes and dish washers are a good idea too.
In my neighborhood (admittedly, originally built in the 50s) every single sale I can remember from the last 15 years has resulted it a complete teardown and rebuild bigger. And one of those rebuilds recently changed hands and is undergoing extensive remodeling for over a year now.
It never makes economic sense to tear down a house if you're paying for it (above the land value). It depends on building codes in your area and such but my house is nearly 40 and it's not even close to end of life. Hell, the house I grew up in is still there and it's gotta be approaching 80.
The land value is the key. Often, houses in the 50s-80s were built in what was suburbs or actual small villages back then, with enormous land surrounding them because land was cheap. Nowadays, the urban areas have grown and grown, and with them the desire for space for people to live on - even here in Europe, in Munich for example, land values exploded over the last 20-30 years. Think of like the land price not only doubling or tripling, but increasing tenfold or more since the houses were built.
Say you have land with a house that was worth 50.000 $ when it was constructed... and now, the land alone can be worth millions. So you tear down the existing house that's in the middle of the plot, build four new houses on it, each one bigger than the old one, and sell three of the four houses to pay for your new home and a nice chunk of cash. Or you rent the houses out for absurd amounts of money and never have to work a day in your life again.
And that happens not just with houses 50 years or older. Here in Munich, I've seen this happen with houses younger than me, simply because land values went up so immensely.
Munich is fucking expensive, I'm actually looking towards moving away entirely and save up to buy something when prices ever become reasonable. Forget about saving anything while living here - Munich drives away those who have been born here all the time.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchner-milliardenspi...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-grundstueckspr...
Wood doesn't get any weaker with age. Assuming no water damage, 200 year old timber houses are just as durable now as when they were built. In fact 200 year old timber houses in America are more durable than anything you can build now because the quality of wood 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, is better than what you can get now, and the quality of wood 100 years ago in America is better than anything Europe has had for multiple hundreds of years!
Also drywall is a nice material for many reasons. Need a new wall? One day of work. Want to remove a wall? If there isn't a support beam, not an issue. American houses can be reconfigured as the needs of family and society change. My 1950s house has had walls removed and added throughout its life and owners, which is why it has an up to date flow despite what was a very constricted original floor plan.
Also dry wall is easy to fix and paint.
Water is an issue, yes. That part sucks.
Finally, in regards to natural disasters, wood construction can withstand earthquakes far better than stone construction!
Most common major structural work with stick built houses is jacking them up and replacing the foundation. That's because the concrete or masonry foundation has deteriorated but the wood framing is in good condition.
I would expect a large condo association's maintenance staff to be able to handle this sort of thing very easily.
Pure stainless steel water tanks don't have this flaw, but they aren't they common.
Depends a lot on how corrosive/nasty the water is in an area though. Some are just nuts.
I've also seen them placed in areas with tile floors and a drain just in case. Sounds like much of the decentralized system damage from water heaters is customer neglect.
It would not work for me as I usually have the house around 16 degrees C in winter. Needless to say my energy bill is very low :)
Ofc, it the thermostats used are bad there might be problems.
I was only visiting, so I don't know if it was the original design, or if the valves have jammed.
Offices have multiple thermostats per floor.
Interesting because I could regulate mine after all the radiators were replaced around 20 years ago.
And I kind of had to because the workers installing them made a mistake and I got the radiator meant for the living room, so it was grossly oversized for the space it heated.
That being said it's usually mandatory to keep them at least half-open considering that the heat is shared with other apartments.
I now live in a building from the early 90s and the knobs are all functional but I don't use them because the city pumps heat according to the weather outside.
Yeah that was kinda the thing. She could technically close it but then the neighbours would complain.
I would hate that as most of the time I use no heating (or cooling) at all. Also, I wouldn't like to pay for it if I don't even use it.
PS: I live in a nicely mild-climated mediterranean coastal city so I can imagine "not using the heater" is not really a done thing if you live in Finland :)
True, my sister's family lives in a house with centralized heating and they pay 3-4 times more (!) per month compared to our home which simply uses an on-demand heater.
Germany is a very rich country with the poorest people in Europe. Germany has a huge amount of political and corruption problems and they are covered up well. You will be shocked by the tax rate too if you tried to earn an income. Median German households are the poorest in all of Europe. Don't just take my word for it either.
Most household water pipes really aren't insulated, or aren't insulated well enough. Plus, moving water under the frostline means that the ground it's moving through might be upwards of 55 degrees F.
My house came with an outdoor wood boiler (it's more a rural cabin than a house, really). It moves 180*F water from the boiler 50 feet underground into the house, where it runs through an air exchanger in the central air system and pipes it back out to be reheated.
Newer models of these things can get upwards of 98-99% burn efficiency, and ~85% heat transfer efficiency- as good as or better than you can get with standard efficiency furnaces.
Best part is you don't even care about heat loss because you're trying to get rid of all that heat anyway.
This scheme has been inplace since the 60's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Power_Station
District Heating is quite popular in much of the world. USA built the first such system back in 1853. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
But if you have to have coal, it makes good sense to harvest the energy rather than wastefully pumping the steam into cooling towers.
Back when the coal power plant was built it was pretty normal to live near coal burning things.
the grand scheme as i wrote above does not seem cost effective only because of the heat pump. if it were cheaper, i would definitely buy it because radiators/solar water/solar panels are low/no maintenance while heat pump does have it.
>Our heat pump water heater comes with a 2- years warranty and a dependable service for the inner tank.
this is like the premium heat pump contract manufacturer. good brand with a good reputation.
roughly 10 years is what the installer told me. refrigerators in india come with a 5+10 year warranty usually so this 2 year warranty is indicative.
Indeed, even with "free" heat from CHP you can get an economic net loss.
Every house connected is a lot if piping, most of it unproductive — heating empty space, and losses in piping. So CHP district heating work best with large apartment buildings, and worst with single family housing.
This way Danish 65C° district heating for detached housing may be the worst example of district heating adoption.
And even if you do have only commie block style apartments, you may still end with having to add extra heat from local boilers in very cold climates. There regions in Russia where heating eats 1/3 of regional GDP.
But an overall, does district heating makes sense? Hell yes, and it must be made mandatory in the West one way, or another, along with policies to prevent counterproductive outcomes.
Also, You dont really insulate the steam distribution pipes, you just count the loss bug as a feature “heated roads and sidewalks to melt snow!”
Lastly, district heat doest work in American low density
Also note that modern systems does not use steam distribution, but high-pressure hot water distribution.
- efficiency of gas heaters, both with tanks and without, is definitely not 98%. Only the most modern condensing boilers can achieve over 90% efficiency, and the utter majority of heating systems are old clunkers [2].
- a central plant can/has to install exhaust and condensate filtering systems, whereas decentral heaters just pipe their exhaust into the environment
- gas lines are a massive fire and explosion risk
- decentralized heaters that are based on burning anything are carbon monoxide risks - in Germany alone, it's usual to have a dozen people or more die due to CM poisoning by a defective heater [3] each year.
- a district heating system can be adapted to different fuels (anything from trash over oil to gas or geothermal energy can be used), whereas a switch of the heat source is completely out of the question in a decentralized system (which is a real big issue here in Europe at the moment, as alone in Germany half the heat is generated by gas burners [4])
- a central plant can also use energy to power electricity generators, thereby improving total efficiency
> You dont really insulate the steam distribution pipes
Of course we do. Right around the corner where I live there is a centralized heating in construction, and these pipes are heavily insulated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler
[2] https://www.effizienzhaus-online.de/zwei-drittel-aller-heizu...
[3] https://www.focus.de/immobilien/wohnen/wohnen-13-tote-durch-...
[4] https://www.bmwi-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/20...
The idea that anything can be insulated at all is fucking novel.
New construction has minimum standards these days, but that does nothing for the majority of older house which have single glazed window, iron roofs, and no insulation whatsoever and, if you're renting, lucky to have a heat pump.
And yeah, no insulation on the hot water piping means massive loses from water heater to tap.
Double glazing is now not heinously expensive anymore. But still seems to have the Australia Tax.
In Hobart I once lived in a place that had radiators. I made the mistake of keeping the place comfortable and it cost me $700 of cheap hydro power in a fortnight.
Faster hot water incentivizes hand washing. Just think about how many more people would wash their hands at the airport if they didn't have to wait 2 minutes (or forever) to get hot water.
More info “District heating and cooling in Sweden” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421...
I'm on the far side of the island from the plant, and in winter you can absolutely tell the difference in water temperature. In summer months there's an anti-scald unit in every home that's necessary to prevent it being too hot, but in winter sometimes you end up with rather lackluster showers.
1/16th probably sounds high, but the extra halving is because flow rate increases as radius^4, not cubed as one might guess.
Guessing the reason for extra increased flow is some edge effect / turbulence mechanisms?
Badly maintained infrastructure (as an American you're probably familiar with the idea). Keeps breaking down. Not enough money invested to bring it to modern standards. Pipes are not well insulated, they break down constantly, huge leakages and losses.
Cost of heating is so high that about 20% or more of the entire Bucharest city budget (I've just checked, budget: ~$1.8 billion, subsidies: ~$450 million; Bucharest has about 2.2 million people) is spent on subsidizing heat for poor families. Heating/hot water sometimes go down for hours or even days in random districts.
In many districts district heating is mandatory because everyone who can pull out does so and that makes the system even more inefficient, which would cause the collapse of the entire system, hurting poor families even more.
And it's usually quite localized, some blocks don't have it, obviously if it affects large chunks of the population priority goes up.
They have tons of experience with pipes, they can swap gas furnaces for heat pumps and exchangers.
And it turns out that the areas that district heating works well with are really comparable to where it makes sense to pump natural gas. Yoi don't necessarily need heated pipes, just using the ambient temp in the ground is usually good, with very small bits of storage/heating.
It only works well when heating is 'free' - such as when you're using waste heat from a nuclear power plant, or from overproducing solar/wind plants.
But the users need to have different heat exchangers than just radiators, if you just put cold water into radiators they'll start sweating precipitation and you'll get mold etc damage.