Hello everyone, recently my city has been doing some repairs to the city’s hot water system and i was without hot water for about 3 weeks.
That got me wondering, how exactly does this work? I read something about a heating agent but i don’t know what that means. And how does the water stay hot while travelling from the place it gets heated to our homes?
Thanks!
In: 25
The pipes are insulated and the water is under high pressure so it doesn’t spend that long in the pipes. And when the hot water arrives at your house it doesn’t go to your tap, it is used to heat your cold drinking water, and then it’s returned to the boilers to be reheated.
My best guess would be that it works a lot like an electrical grid but in reverse. Right before the power gets to your home, you have a transformer that lowers the strength of the electricity and distributes it to individual homes.
I’d imagine there would be a similar system but instead there is a local station, like a building with boilers, that raises the temperature of the water right before it gets to your neighborhood. I worked at an apartment complex that had a giant boiler that supplied the hot water to all the apartment buildings. It was a big problem because the hot water would get used up by people bathing in the mornings.
Otherwise I don’t see how hot water would flow from any further away since the water would naturally lose heat by sitting in the pipes and as it travels it loses heat due to thermal dynamics.
This reminds me of the water towers in Pratt, KS
[https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/3488](https://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/3488)
So for hot water you either have the city provide hot water directly to you or they send really hot water that goes though a heat exchanger that takes the heat from the city and inputs the heat to your build.
They can also do this with steam where they send steam to your building and you take the heat from the steam though a heat exchanger to heat up water in your building.
The city I lived in in Switzerland also had it.
The answer is thermal insulation, the hot water pipes had VERY thick insulation around them.
Where I love we have a water-to-energy plant that provides steam heating and hot water to adjacent buildings but it is not a city wide system.
In my old city they had steam pipes from central boilers that ran under certain streets to keep them from icing over when it was very cold since the city has a lot of steep hills.
In Reykjavik, they literally just pump hot water out of the ground and deliver it to homes.
It depends on your water source, delivery system, and distance. It’s why I’m glad I have a tankless water heater. If a anything goes wrong it’s in my control.
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