Building a home

[Jon Miller]

Pretty sure it is used in Sweden too.

JM
(And in many US cities)

[Nikolai]

Never heard of power plants' excess heat being used for housing. Perhaps it's not used in Norway, I dunno. Almost all power is made from water here. According to Wikipedia, 135 TWh of 137 TWh is from hydroelectric plants.

[MikeH]

Yeah, wouldn't make much sense from a hydroelectric plant!

It doesn't really matter how much heat is lost between the plant and the building to be warmed, because this is waste heat that was previously vented off via cooling towers into the atmosphere anyway. But the modern insulation is pretty good anyway.

[Asher]

Er. It's really common.

Apparently only in the old world. Probably because:
1) It's far more densely populated
2) The buildings are far older and many don't have dedicated space for such modern conveniences
3) In Russia's case, it was purely philosophical in Soviet Russia and was very inefficient anyway. In Soviet Russia, District Heats You.

District heating is absolutely unheard of in the New World except for downtown cores. And that's largely because businesses like to outsource everything.

[Asher]

Pretty sure it is used in Sweden too.

JM
(And in many US cities)

1% of the UK uses it.
The US and Canada it's wayyyy below 1%.

According to wiki, virtually all of the US district heating systems are in downtown areas and most date back to the 1900s. Clearly not a "modern" solution.

[Asher]

Again -- Nordic and Eastern European thing. Iceland is 95% due to the prevalence of geothermal.

The future of many of these systems are in doubt. The same kind of problems many district heating operations in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have today, many North American steam district heating systems began to experience in the 1960s and 1970s. In North America, the owners (in many cases power utilities) lost interest in the district heating business and provided insufficient funding for maintenance, and the systems and service to customers started to deteriorate. The result was that the systems started losing customers. The reliability decreased and finally the whole system closed down. For example, in Minnesota in the 1950s there were about 40 district steam systems, but today only a few remain.

[notyoueither]

I have never heard of this happening anywhere.

You don't recall the burst pipe in NYC a couple of years ago? It wasn't a huge story, but it did run on the networks for a couple days.

[onodera]

Dunno, personal heating still sounds to me as rural as having your own water well, your own propane tank or your own septic tank.

[Asher]

Dunno, personal heating still sounds to me as rural as having your own water well, your own propane tank or your own septic tank.

Your own propane tank? Of course you have your own propane tanks.

We've got natural gas lines here, but no propane line for housing.

As I've said, district heating makes zero sense for detached housing. District heating outside of densely populated downtown cores sounds like a quaint anachronism more than a trait of modern cities.

I have a really hard time seeing how it's more efficient to pipe heated air dozens of kilometers than it is to locally have a 95%+ efficiency natural gas furnace.

[Nikolai]

Dunno, personal heating still sounds to me as rural as having your own water well, your own propane tank or your own septic tank.

What do you mean by "personal heating"? The normal way to heat a personal home here in Norway would be by dedicated electrical ovens and heater cables in the floor.

[notyoueither]

Dunno, personal heating still sounds to me as rural as having your own water well, your own propane tank or your own septic tank.

Most cities in NA were built piecemeal over the years. There has been little good planning until recently when people began to question WTF we've been doing. Now many newer cities are redeveloping older areas according to rational plans.

The City of Edmonton is redeveloping an airport in the middle of the city. They'll turn it into housing for ~30K people using something like centralised geothermal.

[Dinner]

Pretty sure it is used in Sweden too.

JM
(And in many US cities)

I know it is used in Sweden. They were big proponents and were involved in mass implimenting the technology through out whole cities. It makes sense since the Swedes have a social conscience and their government tries to help people while promoting energy efficiency (largely because the country is a energy importer so they had to push up efficiency but maybe baltic sea oil and natural gas will make them energy independent).

[Dinner]

1% of the UK uses it.
The US and Canada it's wayyyy below 1%.

According to wiki, virtually all of the US district heating systems are in downtown areas and most date back to the 1900s. Clearly not a "modern" solution.

In the US, NYC uses it (that's the steam escaping from many city manhole covers) and most military bases which were around during the new deal got retrofitted with it. Hell, even here in San Diego Naval Air Station Coronado has it though honestly it's likely the last place in the US to need it since it's the most mild part of a county known for very mild weather. Still, it is there. The rest of the city uses either electricity or natural gas though with houses built before ~1980 using natural gas and houses built after 1980 using electricity.

[Hauldren Collider]

Having your own septic tank is not necessarily rural. Sometimes, it's not practical to hook a house up to the sewer system. It could still be well within the suburbs.

[Dinner]

Why is the deck railing metal? Even around here everyone used wood because stained or painted wood looks better, and less cheap, then chinzy metal railing.