Eli5: How does a hotel always have hot water for every occupant?
In: 1975
I live in a condo. In Europe. There are 150 condos in this building, and nearby there are other similar buildings. Typical ugly blocks of flats build during the “Socialistic era”. We have central heating and it also provides hot water for each and every flat. Hot water never, ever runs out. There is central heating plant in town and it supplies hot water for all big buildings. There is a “thermal substation” in each neighborhood where the heat is supplied centrally from the power plant and they heat water for all buildings in a borough.
New York has similar system, I think, with distribution of steam all around city center.
german chimney sweep here. we check everything that got a flame and is bolted down. we have 1 hotel in our district that got a whole shopping mall in the same building. they got 3 giant, 2 stories high, water tanks that each get heated by a 1500KW Gas burners. the tank volume is so large that every hotel guest can take a long shower in the morning without the temperature in the tanks going below 70⁰C but that usually doesn’t happen so the tanks stay at ~85⁰C 24/7. every time the temperature drops a few degrees the burners fire up till 85⁰C is reached again. if space like that isn’t available the only other solution i’ve seen is electrical waterheaters in every hotelroom that turn on every time you turn on hot water.
I worked at a hotel that had 1 water heater per 25 rooms and 1 circulation pump per 50 rooms. Take into account the public areas, housekeeping laundry, and restaurant/bar, we had maybe 17 water heaters plus circulating pumps strategically placed throughout the building to ensure hot water was available anywhere at anytime.
not all of them do apparently. booked a hotel room for my birthday with some friends/family (i can’t remember which) that happened to have a restaurant on the first floor- apparently the hot water got shut off every night at 10:30 so the restaurant could do dishes or something? i remember calling to complain i had been trying to use the hot tub for like half an hour with zero of the “hot” and they just said “yeah, no hot water after 10:30, [restaurant] has dishes to do”. would’ve been nice to have some warning!
Where in Uganda once, about 4 hours away from Kampala, at a wedding, and that Hotel only had hot water for 2 hours, in our 3 days stay.
I still remember that the guy in the lobby ran around to every room to notify that they did indeed have hot water RIGHT NOW! And that we should hurry, since it could disappear just as quick as it came.
All in all, a pleasant stay, if you disregard the cold showers. Even had a passion fruit tree in the garden!
From my personal experience, the 64-room hotel I worked at had a boiler tank big enough that it wouldn’t have fit into one of the guest rooms.
The same reason apartment buildings and condo do — a central boiler heating plant designed to constantly provide enough hot water when it’s needed
We have an instantaneous system. Steam heats water REALLY hot, ~170 deg F. Another valve then mixes thst with colder water to get ~140 deg F water out of the boiler room. The water is **constantly circulated by pump**, there is hot water with 10′ of every guest room all of the time. 16 story building with hundreds of feet of piping.
We had to do a fixture count of the building when this system was designed. It was sized based on 956 “fixture units”, by the manufacturer. there are 372 guest rooms, one sink one shower in each, the rest is public space and back-of-house. it’s not sized to run every fixture, they have some factor they use as an educated guess. We have tested it, if you run hot water full blast in the sink and shower in about 30 rooms it is maxed out.
Fun fact: during conventions we have had water shortages. Everybody wakes up and showers at the same time, to go to the same event.
Built a hotel once. Every room had its own water heater in the ceiling, usually in a closet.
I remember being at some cheaper motels back in the 80s where this definitely was not true. Hot water would run out during the “morning rush”.
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