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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

It's weird for me to think of this as a forgotten technology having gone to Penn State where all of campus was heated by a district steam system.

Between east and west campus, they have a capacity of 700,000 lbs of steam per hour.

https://opp.psu.edu/unit/steam-services

https://news.psu.edu/story/460837/2017/04/17/campus-life/one...

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Many universities and other institutions like hospitals are steam heated because they have the steam anyway from their own combined-cycle power plants. I guess this is a legacy of universities having power before widespread electrification? In any case it’s very efficient. Steam can provide not just heating but also cooling and refrigeration. If you already have the technical staff to run your own power station then maintaining steam distribution should cause you any additional headaches.

Up until the advent of inexpensive heat pumps, using electricity for space heating wasn't very practical. There were some electrically-heated (using resistance-coils baseboards) in the 50s and 60s, I guess when they thought electricity would be "too cheap to meter" soon enough, but it requires electrical distribution infrastructure well above what you'd otherwise need for housekeeping loads.

The big reason for centralized steam rather than small boilers in each building was fuel. Penn State (and many other colleges / institutions in the northeast) was originally heated with coal. There was a rail spur that ran to the campus power plant for delivering it. Delivering coal to each building would have been a lot of effort, and negates the efficiency of a large boiler compared to small ones. So you create the steam in one place and then distribute the steam. (Also there used to be fairly strict rules on having a licensed "operating engineer" at each boiler when it was operating.)

With natural gas now being the dominant fuel, it's almost certainly more efficient to distribute the gas and then generate the steam (or hot water, much more common today) near the point of use, with a high-efficiency boiler/heater.

My employer has a campus similar in size to a midsize university, which formerly used district steam heating from a central boiler plant. About a decade ago it was decided that moving to a modern distributed system with a natural gas boiler in each building would net better energy and cost efficiency, and while the transition took several years and was fairly disruptive in terms of the construction in each building, it's ended up delivering as promised.

I just don't think central heating has the advantages today it used to, unless you're in the unusual situation that you have a "free" source of steam (e.g. from process equipment). The boilers used now are compact, low maintenance, and have impressive remote management features. The "steam plant" staff here went from a dozen operating a building to a computer workstation at the facilities operations desk for remote monitoring and a few roving maintenance technicians.

We are also currently transitioning from a central standby power plant to generators located at each building. This is being done for almost the exact same reasons - the generators today are small, low cost, perform testing and exercise automatically, and are remotely monitored.

In our little corner of northeast Ohio (east side inner ring Cleveland suburbs), the -majority- of homes use steam heating, as they were constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Never quite occurred to me that this is a historical/geographical oddity.

There's at least one HVAC company around here that still specializes in boilers and radiators. We had our boiler replaced last year and the system tuned up - there's hardly any water hammer or hissing now and as other commenters have mentioned, the heat feels great.

Ditto, I went to NCSU and they have an extensive steam heating system. I believe chilled water is also used for cooling. We (semi-)famously have an extensive underground tunnel network across campus that people have broken into and explored.

Duke University, just a few miles away from NC State, had a coal-fired boiler system (switched to NG in 2011) and a spur railroad line for delivery of that coal. One of the roads names bears this history, today : West Campus' Coal Pile Drive.

Article: https://www.miuraboiler.com/resources/news/blowing-off-steam

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