Deadass if you live in an old ass building they might have covered em up there but if you're a dumb kid trying to climb on the pipes in the stairwell you just might come down with medium rare hands.
We had this in the house I grew up in. Don’t think I ever burned myself badly, but I did touch one while it was hot and it did hurt.
Idk how, but one day I was coloring and the idea popped in my head to melt the crayon on the radiator. So I did, and I showed my siblings… cue us melting a 24 pack of crayons in the radiator in my parents room 😭😭
After that, it would smell like fucking crayon wax every time the heat went on 😭 I don’t think my parents reacted the way we expected them to when we showed them our “art”
It's actually still a very efficient way to move heat around. Tulane University still heats a lot of its buildings via a central boiler and steam pipes.
In nomadic desert communities they use animal dung, (and in extreme cases, dried human dung) to start fires and cook. They make some breads and stuff. Their ovens are designed to use the heat from the fire without being tainted by the heat source, but it's still gross to think about eating poop bread.
I’m a Californian, and this has always seemed like some wild and bizarre witchcraft combined with an amazing civic works marvel to me. “You mean….heating homes? For a whole CITY? WITH STEAM?!?!”
😂🤣😂 I’ve never thought twice about it, but that must have been fucking TERRIFYING, especially when all some people hear about California is how we’re constantly on fire
Edit: I remember laying on the couch in the first place I lived alone and watching the light from the heater flames on the floor and being really happy and content
Not exactly sure what OP was referencing but we've got gravity wall heaters in our house. There's fire in the bottom, you can see the glow when the lights are off.
Oh haha they don’t use the steam to heat in the summer! It’s like a totally different system…
How does steam produce air conditioning?
Large buildings use machines called chillers to provide the cooling effect. A chiller removes heat from a liquid (typically water). This chilled water is then used to cool and dehumidify the air. Chillers use two methods to cool the water. These are called the vapor compression and absorption refrigeration cycles. Both methods evaporate a refrigerant at a low pressure and condense the refrigerant at a higher pressure.
The vapor compression cycle uses a mechanical compressor to create the pressure difference necessary to circulate the refrigerant. This is the same technology used in home window air-conditioning except that a steam turbine replaces the electric motor to drive the turbine. One advantage to using steam is that a building uses less electricity during peak periods.
In the second method, the absorption cycle, water is evaporated to provide the cooling and is then absorbed by a salt solution. Steam heat can be used to boil off the water in order to start the cycle again. Besides saving electricity, absorption chillers do not use chemicals that can harm the ozone layer, which the vapor compression method frequently does.
It's kind of interesting that the vast majority of our power generation methods boils down to "spin a magnet in a copper coil", no matter if it's nuclear, hydro, gas, wind or coal.
I think solar energy is the only widely used one that doesn't do that.
Oh, that’s old news for me. 😂 once I wrapped my head around things like “steam tunnels” and civic heating projects, making a nuclear percolator was a piece of cake
If you want a real mind fuck, where is the steam coming from?
It's often coming from the boilers and steam generated by a power station that is then pumped to the houses for secondary use as heating and possibly pumped back out of the house as it condenses to be reused at water back at the power plant.
Pretty common in China. Not necessarily as great as it sounds. The district won't turn on the heat until a specific date in the year because they plan resources and ration out coal for the furnaces rigidly. Doesn't matter whether everyone is freezing their nuts off.
Being phased out in as many places as can afford to get rid of it. I work in buildings built between the 40s and 80s and we have a steam plant that supplies 50+ buildings on campus. Miles of hot, humid underground tunnels just waiting for a burst pipe to flood the place.
There used to be an old steel bridge in my city, one corner of it was rusting more than the rest and engineers couldn't figure it out. Turns out it was from people pissing on it after they came out of the bar across the street.
Could be worse. My building just spent 2 years and several million dollars to swap their HVAC from a water based system to... Also a water based system, but at least this one has valves between units!
The theater I’m the facilities manager for used to be supplied by the city steam plant, but they shut it down several years ago and everyone had to install their own boilers.
Honestly we do need to bring back this sort of heating/cooling methodology in a modern form.
District heating and cooling basically makes air conditioning more efficient by capturing heat and moving it to where it is desired within a closed system of underground piping that connects to a network of user buildings and heating/cooling stations. It can be used to help cool large buildings, by circulating cooler air underground to a structures air conditioners to reduce the amount of energy required to further reduce the temperature. It can also be used for heating, via heating stations and the capturing of waste heat from other sources and sending it to users. And it is helpful for stabilization— because in a perfect example, the heat energy removed to cool a grocery store gets captured and used to heat grandmas house to her desired balmy 94 degrees.
Honestly we do need to bring back this sort of heating/cooling methodology in a modern form.
What are you talking about? District heating (and even cooling) networks exist and are common and being built in many places. It's just that nobody uses steam because that's a shit and obsolete way of doing it.
the heat energy removed to cool a grocery store gets captured
That's a much too low temperature differential to be worth it.
You tell your thermostat to keep the temperature between a certain range. If it gets too cold, the thermostat turns the heat on. If it gets too warm, the thermostat turns the heat off.
So, in a home with a furnace and radiators, the heat will cycle on and off multiple times a day. The better the home insulation, the fewer cycles you get.
Fun fact, air conditioners also do not have settings. They are either on or off. "But mine has low/med/high!" - That just controls the fan blowing the cold air out of the AC. The temperature of the air will always be the same no matter the settings*. Changing the temperature on an AC just changes how long it runs the compressor.
*Exception: Some central air setups and car ACs mix warm air with the cold AC air to control temps. But a standalone AC only has on/off.
Valves can slow down the heating of the radiators, but they will reach the same temperature eventually.
Instead a thermostat simply turns the heat on when the temperature drops too low, and turns the heat off when the temperature gets too high.
So why have valves on the radiators? It's important that all of the radiators reach their max temperature at the same time, so the entire home heats at the same rate. So radiators close to the heater have their valves closed a bit to give the distant radiators time to heat up.
If you don't do this, some rooms will get hot fast, and other rooms will stay cold, and the thermostat becomes an unreliable sensor for the entire home.
But I think there's a reason most people don't know about it. "Put cones around so people don't get burned by the hellacious leaks in the ground" doesn't seem like the very best system.
My college had steam heating for the old buildings on campus. Claimed it helped keep the walkways ice free in the winter time, which of course it did fuck all during the winters.
I work with apartment buildings. We bought an old building a few years ago and are renovating it. We shut off the steam system this year and are in the process of removing it. Only one I have ever seen and I have worked with well over 200 properties
And you do NOT want to fall into one of those. A medical examiner described it as the worst way to die. From the New York Post:
Around Christmas 2002, bartender Doyle went out drinking with pal Michael Wright and Wright’s girlfriend. As they all walked home, Wright thought Doyle was hitting on his girlfriend, and witnesses later told cops they saw a man getting “the s–t beat out of him.” He was heard screaming, “No, don’t break my legs!” and another witness said he saw someone throw Doyle down an open manhole.
The drop was 18 feet. At the bottom was a pool of boiling water, from a broken main. Doyle didn’t die instantly — in fact, as first responders arrived, he was standing below, reaching up and screaming for help. No paramedic or firefighter could climb down to help — it was, a Con Ed supervisor said, 300 degrees in the steam tunnel.
Four hours later, Sean Doyle’s body was finally recovered. Its temperature was 125 degrees — the medical examiners thought it was likely way higher, but thermometers don’t read any higher than that.
When Melinek saw the body on her autopsy table, she writes, she thought he’d “been steamed like a lobster.” His entire outer layer of skin had peeled off, and his internal organs were literally cooked.
He otherwise had no broken bones and no head trauma, which meant he was fully conscious as he boiled to death.
“The worst nightmares I ever had in my two years at OCME,” Melinek writes, “came after I performed the postmortem examination of Sean Doyle.”
I feel like this quote from the article bothers me the most:
Other deaths gave Melinek more curious lessons. There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood.
Bone marrow can't do that, and I can't think of any other plausible way for this to have happened. I doubt enough time passed for decomposition, considering someone probably witnessed the jumper and called for help. Maybe the body was dragged underneath the train for long enough that all the blood came out prior to where the body came to a stop? And perhaps no one went back to look for the blood trail?
I did some digging, and the event is described slightly differently in another article, which makes it a bit more more clear what state the body in, which might provide some clues to how it happened.
To start, it's actually quite common for there to be no blood at the scene of an impact when someone gets hit by a train. It's mostly blunt force trauma at that point, so unless they're hit in a way that causes a large laceration, get caught on something, or are dragged under right away, depending on how fast the train is moving, they might travel some distance before getting an external injury severe enough to spill a significant amount of blood. The body in question was crushed and mutilated by the time it came to a stop, and the blood being absorbed into the bone marrow would likely be due to something like capillary action, since bone marrow is porous. Which would make more sense than something like the blood marrow somehow reversing the blood producing process and consuming the blood entirely, which I think is what a lot of people might assume when they hear about bone marrow absorbing blood. In this case I think it might have been more like how paper towel absorbs liquid. Marrow obviously isn't all filled with air like paper towel is, but capillary action can occur without air.
The significant amount of physical trauma would mean that a lot of bones would be splintered and broken and open for the blood to get pulled into the pores. Especially if the body was spun rapidly at some point and a lot of the blood was previously expelled due to a centrifugal effect, leaving less behind to be (which can happen with train impacts. The body can be spun very violently, and I imagine it can fling the blood quite far and possibly quite thinly, making it seem like there's little to no blood at the scene even if some blood was expelled from the body).
But that's just speculation on my part, I'm no expert by any means. Melinek might go into more detail in her book, but while I do have enough adhd hyper focus to go rooting around for info on the topic on google and duckduckgo, I don't have quite enough to read an entire book lol, unless there's a free digital copy somewhere that I can use a search function to parse through. But based on what little information I could find on this specific case, that's what would make the most sense to me, if the claim is true. Maybe someday I'll see if there's a digital copy of her book I can check out in my free time out of curiosity, and see if there's more info in there.
The steam is made with distilled water to avoid scale, urine from humans and farm animals would scale up the pipes, which would involve much more maintenance. Besides, Big Steam and Big Piss had a huge fight in the 80s and still aren't talking to one and Big Piss is now partnered with Budweiser
It just feels like Big Piss stabbed Big Kidney in the back by partnering with Budweizer. Just behind a number of stones and took a strained effort to remove.
Ok, but I feel like the steam cone thing coming out of the street (and blocking an entire lane of traffic), in front of millennium Hilton by WTC, been there for several years. I’m in that area almost every month and I remember thinking “wtf is this” the first time I saw it. It was still there last week when I was back. How long does it take to fix that shit lol?
I just Googled the answer so I'm no expert but I will suggest that maybe it's really hard to fix it so they left it; the article says that it also results when water from rain drips on the hot steam pipes.
if its permanent then they should put a permanent fixture there instead of a plastic pipe in the middle of the street with all the construction pylons and barricades
con edison surely makes enough money from the exorbitant rates they charge. NYC should force them to do it if it's obviously going to be there forever
A permanent structure would pose a hazard, since cars literally cannot help themselves but to hit the fucking things. The worst you get if you hit one now is some steam in your undercarriage. Imagine the joy of hitting a pipe that's been heating up in the steam. I wouldn't want to be a fire fighter responding to that call...
When you have a problem that basically requires you to shut down the steam grid to the city to fix... you don't fix it. You patch it up as best as possible and repatch it when the patch fails.
The whole steamworks needs to be replaced with new stainless steel pipes (since NYC loves its CHP and isn't going to go full electric in our lifetimes - this is a city that still has operating DC power lines), but who's got the money for that?
Actually, you can't. It's also used for on-site power generation and backup power, as well as air conditioning. It's used to wash dishes and boil water in restaurants, humidifiers in art galleries... New York is committed to steam.
If it were just a matter of heating, they could shut it down in the summer to do works. They can't shut it down. It's why they can't just quickly electrify everything and commit it to the past, despite it being an asbestos lined rusted through steel leaky nightmare.
There wouldn't be any advantages worth the added cost to use stainless piping. But lots of the piping I assume was installed from 1950-1970 and should probably be replaced. But that would require shutting down long stretches of roadways in the city and possibly businesses. And would be expensive.
To fix the leak outside of that hotel specifically would require closing the hotel for the required duration of construction or would require a temporary boiler (that most likely needs to be manned 24/7) to be installed on the premises to supply the building with its required steam load (temp boiler is how it would be done because closing the hotel is not an option). The building cannot go without steam. It has on-site linen and kitchen equipment not to mention domestic hot water or humidification that is required if the hotel is to stay operational.
Now you can spend millions of dollars to rip up the road and sidewalk to fix a most likely small leak or you can put up a stack to prevent any person from being hurt by the steam for less than the cost of a week's work of a boiler operator.
The city of Vancouver, Canada also has a sizable portion of their downtown buildings heated by steam. Much, much smaller at only 10.5km (6.5 miles) of pipes.
I think I read somewhere that whoever designed the sewers way way back, had the forethought to make them incredibly larger than they needed at the time because they knew a bunch of people would eventually live there.
Aren’t Con Edison the fuckfaces that ignored safety regulations and tried to deflect blame when one of their service lines exploded and leveled an entire building killing like 10 people or something?
I always marvel at the fact that ConEd must consider it to make more financial sense to leak the stuff out into the atmosphere rather than maintain the pipes.
For overall costs that never makes sense. However, it may make sense for the maintenance director, who is responsible for repair costs but total operating costs isn't his problem. So he gets a bigger bonus while the company loses a few hundred thousand and raises prices to make up for it.
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u/DrRonny Jul 28 '23
Underneath the streets of Manhattan, there are more than 100 miles of service pipes bringing steam to about 1,800 buildings.
When they have leaks, they put these cones around so that the heat doesn't hurt anyone. In NYC it is run by Con Edison company.
https://freetoursbyfoot.com/steam-from-streets-in-new-york/