Anybody from Alaska?
 

It's still a February and it's cold outside (not in Rio de Janeiro). So here is my question about Alaska. Do you have a central heating system there? Here it could be -40 Celsius outside, but people don't give a flying anything about it. I literally wear only shorts when I'm at home - the central heating system works and I don't care. But what Alaska? Do you have a central heating system or how do you survive during a winter time?

I am not from Alaska, but wanted to clarify what you meant by Central Heating System.
Do you have a independent system inside your house or apartment, or you are receiving the heat from the city?

I live in AZ and use central heating..

I live in Texas and so do we.

For some reason people think Texas doesn't get cold!

Compared to Russia, probably not...

Everybody in Russia has a built-in central heating system. It's something you get out of the box when you buy apartments. It's like a shower in your house. You have it by default. You can't buy an apartment without it. It's a metallic thing under a window which makes 20C+ in your home and does not matter how cold is outside.

In AZ. A central heating system. For real?

Is it a the must thing in your state? How much it is (per a month)?

I would guess it depends where in Alaska you are.

I didn't get it. Alaska is a very small part of a frosted land. I think it's about a same temperature across it.

My gas bill is $30 month, my bill is spread evenly throughout the year. Gas is used for heat for the house,water heater and clothes dryer. I only turn on the heater when the house gets below 65 degrees.

Alaska is not small at all and the North and South, especially in that Gulf Area, would have very different climates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climat...20the%20summer.

Understood. I had a place in Palm Springs, CA (desert community). California Building Codes require a "Heating" System but not a Cooling System. It would be 37 to 47 celsius (100 to 117 fahrenheit) for an minimum average of 4 months each year, and the Air Conditioner / Cooling System was considered "optional".

i cunt a4d any 'heating'... :(

just 'eating'... :(

This. It's 1400 miles from the Alaskan panhandle (think Pacific Northwest temperate coastal rainforest, like Seattle with a bit more snow) to Barrow (windswept barren coastal tundra on the Arctic Ocean, with polar bears). The heating system you have depends on your energy options and how rich you are, which are both related to where you live.

In the interior near the arctic circle, there's lots of firewood (boreal forest) and it's extremely expensive (few roads, navigable rivers don't go anywhere useful) to import bottled gas or fuel oil with which to heat or make electricity. So people burn wood, end of story. Usually that's in a fairly simple wood stove, or several such in a larger house. A few richies have "central wood heat" where the wood stove is more like a furnace and is in a basement (that's why you have to be rich, basements are expensive in places with permafrost) so that the heat can rise through vents throughout the house. Lots more people (who can't or won't cut firewood for various reasons) heat with heating oil similar to diesel fuel. This can be central heat with a furnace if you have electricity; thermostat on the wall like anywhere else and warm air comes out of ducts all over the house. Or there are fancy Japanese oil stoves that are superefficient and just sit in your living room with a cool-to-the-touch exhaust pipe that goes out through the wall. But if you're beyond the reach of the electrical grid, there are also old-fashioned oil heaters that work just like wood stoves except you don't have to feed them by hand.

That's all basically the same in urban Alaska except that burning wood is often illegal for air quality reasons, so you have to burn oil or bottled gas (there's very little, or no, piped natural gas distribution in Alaska). People tend toward good oil furnaces (central heat) or the Japanese stoves (not central) because they are the cheapest (still very expensive). Only poor people (renters in slumlord housing) use electric heat; it costs about three times as much and nobody chooses it except predatory landlords because it's cheap to put in electric baseboard heating and who cares if the tenants can't afford their heating bill?

What is NOT seen in Alaska (except for in a few old-fashioned government complexes like military bases or the University) is the Soviet-style steam heat that is all generated at a central heating plant (burning coal, fuel oil, or natural gas) and then piped from building to building throughout a town or a collection of related buildings. I can't really say why not, as it's the most efficient way to heat a lot of people in the far north. It probably comes back to transportation costs; the workers and pipes and insulation and materials to build steam tunnels or insulated above-ground utility corridors all cost a ton of money to import. Even if it pencils out over time as much cheaper, nobody in the USA is in a position to do the old Soviet central-planner thing of costing out the infrastructure over thirty or fifty years. If it's not cheaper in this calendar year, it won't happen. Next year's budgets and profits are a problem for next year.

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. Both of these would be 'central'. If you live in a house you are probably heating with natural gas via own boiler or if you live within city limits then maybe also central heat from city.

We have central air but it's better to run the (gas) fireplace. It's in the center of the house and heats the entire house for hours.

I have a friend who lives in Alaska. It's odd. It's him and his brother. They have the "family house" in Alaska and then a business here locally. One brother stays six months in California working while the other is on vacation in Alaska, then they switch.

They have lots of remote villages you never heard of.

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.

Total truth. See, for example, Tuluksak, which like most of the bush places has chronic and perpetual infrastructure problems due to general poverty and lack of local economies. (Why do people live there? Well, why do people live anywhere? They were born there, like their ancestors for five or ten thousand years.) https://www.ktoo.org/2021/01/22/no-e...-water-supply/

I live in Las Vegas have two combined central AC/heating systems. One for downstairs, one for upstairs. The heat comes from gas furnaces. The AC comes from a typical central AC unit. They are considered combined because they share air ducting and thermostats for each unit. Thermostats are app controlled and can be adjusted by smartphone or website.

This is a typical setup here, but lots of different types exist. Some use evaporative cooling, some have heat pumps (lines are ran underground and use a geothermal heat transfer grid for heating & cooling) and some places still have old radiant type heaters in each room instead. Some houses in the north, especially the much older ones, may still have oil burning furnaces in their basement.

You could capture your body's own methane emissions and burn that for heat. It's the same thing as natural gas that comes out of the ground.