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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

Oh that's not how commie blocks and heating work. You can't turn the radiators on and off in a classic commieblocks. There is no valve, there is no anything -- your only regulator is a window. The local government picks a day in a calendar once in 5 years when the turning on and off happens. People who talks about efficiency, insulation and all that have no idea.

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I have lived in several commie block apartments over the 30 some years I lived in Romania, and in every single one every radiator had a manual valve I could use to regulate temperature.

Yes, but those valves were rusted stuck open all the time and nobody could change them unless they emptied the whole water circuit, which never happend. And the whole installation was so full of rust, any new valve would only last a year at most until it got stuck again.

It's true that the municipal heating services turn the heat on but there are definitely dials you can turn - I lived in four different commie blocks and in every one the radiators had dials. Nowadays they even have wireless sensors to bill you for the heat you actually used and of course enforce the requirement to have them on most of the time so as to not become a heat sink.

They've proven particularly useful when due to a mistake in reading the apartment plan the workers installed the radiator meant for the living room in my room.

This sounds like a difference between ussr proper and the more broader “eastern block”, as I haven’t seen a single dial on those things in a whole country. The fact you even meter those per-apartment makes me believe even more.

The further western you go from the epicenter of this shitshow, the more amenities those things get

That might be it, as the mentioned commie blocks I lived in are all in Poland.

I don't know if the dials were there during communism as well, but I remember noticing that the radiator in my school did not have one (save for a hex key valve) and thinking it was unusual, so they were already common in the mid 90s.

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