Quote:
Originally Posted by k0nr4d
There's a couple of separate things here with this though. If you live in a flat, your building might have it's own boiler that heats water which is pumped through your radiators, or the building might get hot water from the city via insulated pipes.
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A lotta times heat delivered via heavy metal radiators is actually arriving via piped steam rather than piped hot water. Steam is more efficient at holding heat over long runs. Big buildings in the older parts of the northern USA still have a lot of steam radiators, most dating to the era when building boilers were all coal-fired, even if they've converted to oil or natural gas nowadays. My college in Massachusetts has steam tunnels between/under all the buildings.
The other thing is that big campus-or-city-sized steam distribution systems are often distributing
waste heat from electricity production. It's real common to try and capture waste heat from an electrical generation facility this way.