I am currently in Russia and there is hot water supply in every building. I can see the pipes which contain the hot water but what is the source ?
In: Engineering
I remember seeing that a mall in Russia had flooded with hot water, apparently they have hot water pipes throughout the city.
I believe the term you’re looking for is district heating (DH). It is used to supply a large amount of buildings with hot water by heating the water in combined heat and power (CHP) stations or thermal power stations. In some countries or especially in rural areas district heating isn’t really used, but it’s common in cold, densely populated areas where the need for heat is large.
So the heat is usually generated by burning coal, biomass, natural gas or other fuels with different methods, and the released heat is captured to water and/or steam. If it’s a CHP plant, part of the heat and energy is extracted as electricity in steam turbines. Most of the remaining heat is transferred to DH system in heat exchangers. DH system is basically just a huge system of insulated pipelines with some pumps to keep the water flowing. The pipeline is connected to buildings, where there is a separate heat exchanger that takes heat from the DH water to your domestic hot water, that you’d get from your tap. Domestic water is just clean, cold water coming from your local water supply, and the hot water is the same water but just heated.
ELI5 explanation: power plants heat water in a water circulation system, and your house takes part of that heat.
In Iceland (where I live) we get all our hot water from the earth. It is pumped via insulated pipes and stored in insulted tanks near cities. We actually have a quite nice tanks like that here in Reykjavík. We built a restaurant and observation deck on it. Here is an image of it. Hot water for most of Reykjavík is stored in these tanks.
Image: [Perlan (the pearl)](https://imgur.com/krJxPLy)
The source is the local power station, as well as producing electricity the power station can use the exhaust heat to supply building heating and hot water to surrounding buildings, this only works in relatively densely populated areas.
Might be a nearby thermoelectric plant that regulate itself by dissipating heat surplus by heating up the nearby blocks, but it can work only for the nearby blocks so I guess there must be a chain of heaters to keep the water warm for middle distances.
Waiting for the knower to actually explain it.
Each building has it’s own water heater. Only cold water is supplied and it’s heated inside the building and usually wamed and contained in an insulated tank until it’s required.
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