> As a German living in a city with mandatory district heating... the end result is to be that people seem pay more for heating than they would with a decentralised system.

So, in America, it is very common for hot water tanks to suddenly fail, leaking water everywhere and causing massive amounts of property damage and even creating health hazards through mold.

In a not-insane world, all hot water tanks would come with moisture meters (you can buy them at the hardware store, $20 maybe) that would alert when the tank started to fail. But no, instead, American's are just accustom to the idea that about every 10-15 years, they will have to fix some large amount of water damage.

The condo complex I used to live in had a huge line item for water damage very year, insurance companies charge a large deductible because they know the damage is going to happen. Recently the condo association has taken to enforcing manual inspections of hot water heaters and requires they be replaced after 10 years, due to the large number of insurance claims that were being made.

(I did suggest they just enforce the use of moisture detectors...)

Oh and in condos, the hot water tanks are supposed to be hooked up to a drain so this flooding isn't an issue. But, well, apparently most of them were not hooked up properly. :/

FWIW I've seen this same issue in multiple places I've lived, apartment complexes have issues with hot water tanks going out all the time.

So anyway, my point is, Americans are really bad at moving hot water around.

Disagree with all of this. Hot water leaks are very rare. Water heater failure usually manifests as cold showers and a quick replacement unit from a plumber. Drain pan with a hose is a more reliable protection than a sensor. Sensors are much more likely to give annoying false positives than to prevent damage; you can see from Rheem discussion forums that they’re not appreciated.

Water heater failure is also easy to avoid by annual or seasonal flushing of any accumulated sediment and checking the anode. As long as the anode is replaced, the water heater should be fine.

I would expect a large condo association's maintenance staff to be able to handle this sort of thing very easily.

The ceramic lining of a water heater cracks due to thermal stress over time.

Pure stainless steel water tanks don't have this flaw, but they aren't they common.

That is what the anode is there for, to be the sacrificial corroding element.

Depends a lot on how corrosive/nasty the water is in an area though. Some are just nuts.

I think the real problem is how susceptible houses in US/Canada (maybe elsewhere) are to water leaks of any sort. Drywall, wood, MDF, insulation, etc., are all immediately destroyed with water in a short amount of time. A typical house lasts for 100 years or more and will likely experience many water leaks of various kinds over the course of its lifetime.

Houses last 100 years? They can, but typically after 20 years it starts to make economic sense to scoop the remains of the house into a dump truck and build a fancier house on the now much more expensive land under it.

In my neighborhood (admittedly, originally built in the 50s) every single sale I can remember from the last 15 years has resulted it a complete teardown and rebuild bigger. And one of those rebuilds recently changed hands and is undergoing extensive remodeling for over a year now.

20 years!? That's absurd.

It never makes economic sense to tear down a house if you're paying for it (above the land value). It depends on building codes in your area and such but my house is nearly 40 and it's not even close to end of life. Hell, the house I grew up in is still there and it's gotta be approaching 80.

> It never makes economic sense to tear down a house if you're paying for it (above the land value).

The land value is the key. Often, houses in the 50s-80s were built in what was suburbs or actual small villages back then, with enormous land surrounding them because land was cheap. Nowadays, the urban areas have grown and grown, and with them the desire for space for people to live on - even here in Europe, in Munich for example, land values exploded over the last 20-30 years. Think of like the land price not only doubling or tripling, but increasing tenfold or more since the houses were built.

Say you have land with a house that was worth 50.000 $ when it was constructed... and now, the land alone can be worth millions. So you tear down the existing house that's in the middle of the plot, build four new houses on it, each one bigger than the old one, and sell three of the four houses to pay for your new home and a nice chunk of cash. Or you rent the houses out for absurd amounts of money and never have to work a day in your life again.

And that happens not just with houses 50 years or older. Here in Munich, I've seen this happen with houses younger than me, simply because land values went up so immensely.

20x in Munich? That is new to me.

It depends on the area, yes, but some areas like the Kaufingerstraße went up from 7721€/m² in 1980 to 80.000€ in 2012 [1]. In 2019, not even seven years later, the same area was worth 160.000€/m², and other areas also doubled in value over four years [2].

Munich is fucking expensive, I'm actually looking towards moving away entirely and save up to buy something when prices ever become reasonable. Forget about saving anything while living here - Munich drives away those who have been born here all the time.

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchner-milliardenspi...

[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-grundstueckspr...

European houses are usually built out of bricks and concrete on proper foundations instead of wood and drywall, which means the substance lasts a lot longer itself and it becomes actually economical to do upgrades like heat insulation, PV energy and the likes. Also, we don't have regular extreme weather events like hurricanes that devastate entire countries (and thus make it uneconomical to build expensive houses).

> instead of wood and drywall

Wood doesn't get any weaker with age. Assuming no water damage, 200 year old timber houses are just as durable now as when they were built. In fact 200 year old timber houses in America are more durable than anything you can build now because the quality of wood 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, is better than what you can get now, and the quality of wood 100 years ago in America is better than anything Europe has had for multiple hundreds of years!

Also drywall is a nice material for many reasons. Need a new wall? One day of work. Want to remove a wall? If there isn't a support beam, not an issue. American houses can be reconfigured as the needs of family and society change. My 1950s house has had walls removed and added throughout its life and owners, which is why it has an up to date flow despite what was a very constricted original floor plan.

Also dry wall is easy to fix and paint.

Water is an issue, yes. That part sucks.

Finally, in regards to natural disasters, wood construction can withstand earthquakes far better than stone construction!

Water is always an issue no matter what type of construction. Concrete and masonry? Water and freeze thaw cycles will eventually destroy it.

Most common major structural work with stick built houses is jacking them up and replacing the foundation. That's because the concrete or masonry foundation has deteriorated but the wood framing is in good condition.

My anecdata doesn't align with yours. I've had a water tank fail and I've known a bunch of other people with the same experience.

> in America, it is very common for hot water tanks to suddenly fail, leaking water everywhere and causing massive amounts of property damage and even creating health hazards through mold.

I've had them fail and leak many times. But I had the water heater put in the basement next to a floor drain, and the floor slopes slightly towards the drain. No damage whatsoever from leaks, and it wasn't an emergency to get it fixed, either.

It's stupid simple and cheap to do this, I dunno why I've never seen any other dwelling with such a setup. My house has a number of things like this, making it cheap to maintain.

P.S. I'm an American.

The BC Building Code mandates a floor pan under the HWH, draining into the wastewater system. The floor will be sloped as well, and the drain within X distance of the heater. I expect it’s a Canadian national standard.

The plumbers are always surprised to find my setup. It's the same for the washing machine, which has also saved me from very expensive water damage.

When my parents got their house one of the requirements my mom had was to move the water heater out of the hall closet and into a lean-to outside the kitchen door.

When I was a baby we lived in my aunt's basement for a few months and the water heater flooded the basement and my mom swore she would never live in the same house as one of those again.

At least in California it’s mandatory that it be this way.

A good idea, but not sure it it’s code, is to do the same with the clothes washer.

Flood sensors (there are ones with auto water shutoffs too) for the clothes and dish washers are a good idea too.

This comment is wrong on many levels. Hot water heaters should last a lot longer, and when they fail it’s probably a faulty thermostat or short. Still, water heaters get a drain pan to catch leaks. Lastly, installing a leak detectors are trivial and common. Your condo may have been a bad install or not installed to code.

America moves hot water just fine.

EDIT: yes water heaters can fail. Usually due to bad install, people store stuff on the pipes or on top of the unit treating the mechanical closet like a utility storage closet for brooms vacuum ironing board stuffed in, or subjected to a freeze. Nothing wrong with the device itself, everything to do with improper install or maintenance.

> Lastly, installing a leak detectors are trivial and common.

I've told about a dozen people in my life that leak detectors were a thing, and they were all shocked at the info. From what I gather, their existence is not common knowledge.

> Still, water heaters get a drain pan to catch leaks.

Initial leaks yes, but eventually hot water heats fail in a dramatic fashion and spew water everywhere.

> Your condo may have been a bad install or not installed to code.

Literally every apartment complex I've lived in has had this same issue. The apartment complex's my friends live in, same issue. I figure that commercially ran complexes would be motivated to install leak detectors, but apparently not.

> Hot water heaters should last a lot longer, and when they fail it’s probably a faulty thermostat or short.

Should, sure. The warranty is 10 years on higher end models, and the last ($2000!) water heater I had fail on me failed at 9 years and 6 months.

I've seen older hot water heaters, sure, but the expectation is failure after 10 years. All the plumbers I've ever talked to have repeated exactly that. They also say that a large # of tankless units they have seen encounter motor failures after 10 years and also have to be replaced.

Tanks don't fail unless the anode gets depleted.

You seriously need to tell your condo association to get their maintenance people to flush the water heaters regularly (seasonally or annually) and check/change the anodes. If they're gas-fired heaters, the burner and air intakes should be getting cleaned.

If this isn't being done, it's probably because your maintenance is being done by plumbers, who have convinced everyone that "they just fail, you know?"

Replacing a tankless water heater because the motor has failed is silly. You replace the motor. And tankless heaters don't fail very often unless, again, they don't see regular maintenance. As in: flush/descale annually and water/air filter cleanings.

100 unit complex, no onsite maintenance, each owner is responsible for maintaining their own unit. All exterior entrances, so common areas are outdoors and maintained by contractors.

How does an anode help against a thermal expansion crack in the wall?

1) there should be a thermal expansion tank in the system to stop major pressure cycles. If you don’t have one, you’ll have dangerous high pressure spikes in the system.

2) anodes stop heavy corrosion in the system by sacrificing themselves.

Are you saying its not common for water heaters to fail and cause water damage? Maybe I'm an outlier, but several people have told me that this happened in their homes.

We have several hot water heater apologists in this thread. It's rather amusing.

But I think there must be a regional difference. Maybe hot water tanks fail more depending on the climate or water acidity or something...

One problem is that people never replace their sacrificial anode. Most people don't even know it exists.

They last as long as the expected tank life these days. Tanks with longer life rating use powered rods.

>They last as long as the expected tank life these days.

Kinda seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy or one could even say planned obsolescence.

It does. Unfortunately, homeowners have no interest in paying for premium units or investing in maintenance. So manufacturing precision goes into exceeding the 8-10 year warranty and little more. My hope is that the current and upcoming electric and natural gas pricing increases will lead to more awareness of heat pump water heaters, which last quite a bit longer.

Or an accurate estimate???

I don't really get how you can extract a conspiracy out of something lasting as long as the manufacturer expected it to last.

Many manufacturers design things to wear out or break earlier than they would with minor changes to the design.

It is an accurate estimate, done to increase sales.

I commonly find it's blocked by the installation. My last house it was blocked by the vent stack and one of the water lines.

They leak because the sacrificial anode rod corrodes away. The difference between a 5 year warranty and 12 year warranty water heater is a few inches of metal.

There’s a cheap ($20?) add on for our water heater that adds a conductivity sensor in the drip pan, and a shutoff valve on the inlet.

There’s a slightly more expensive variant from another company that supposedly looks at flow for the whole house, and cuts water off due to slow leaks or burst pipes.

I’m shocked that the water heater cutoff valve isn’t required by code. In contrast, plumbed drain lines for water tank flushing have a much worse payoff per dollar and are required by code around here. (When I’m feeling cynical, I assume that the codes here are designed to subsidize contractors while maximally screwing over home owners.)

Edit: the plumbed lines don’t actually help with leaks; so they do nothing that a garden hose would not accomplish.

> There’s a cheap ($20?) add on for our water heater that adds a conductivity sensor in the drip pan, and a shutoff valve on the inlet.

Oh I know, they are awesome. They should come standard, and more people should know about them. It is one of those things I try to bring up in conversations at random, because holy crap the # of people I know who have had water damage from their water heating dramatically failing is too high. Heck it happened to my family twice while I was growing up.

> the plumbed lines don’t actually help with leaks; so they do nothing that a garden hose would not accomplish.

Why not? I've seen places where with a drip pan angled towards a hole connects to a pipe that drains outside.

It should work for slow leaks. Doesn't do anything if the tank bursts of course...

The drip pan is for slow leaks , not for flushing or a gusher - but most gushers start as slow leaks, and it’s easy for a drip to cause massive damage if it goes unnoticed for months.

What’s the name of this 20 dollar device?!

Just a water tank moisture detector, e.g. https://a.co/0ujkOuD

Did you manage to realize any insurance savings? Or do the BigCo's just not care if you monitor it right?

If they changed the anode rod on the water heater periodically it might last longer. Also the reality is that HVAC and water heater might need periodic inspections.

I was thankful, and shocked, the one year of my life that my HVAC system didn't break down in some fashion.

Hot water heaters should have leak detectors on them. They often don't. The higher end models do. Product differentiation strikes again.

Last water heater I had, the anode was A-OK, I had it checked about a year prior to the water heater failing.

Thermal stress destroys stuff.

Anode rods are consumable. Did you personally see the rod itself during the inspection?

They also don't repair damage. A really mean thing to do would be to replace the anode on a nearly-dead water heater right before selling a house. The minute the anode finishes rusting away, the heater could let go.

I've... Never had a problem that was catastrophic in my adult life. Only real issue we've ever had was someone hit the ac unit with their car.

Curious what sort of load you put on yours to have such terrible luck.

I had one catastrophic failure and several minor ones. Now I have a tankless water heater.

Where I'm from mostly installations have a 2 inch deep drip pan which you place a water detector. It emits a very loud noise if the bottom of it gets wet

ex. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Basement-Watchdog-Battery-Operat...

This doesn't help for catastrophic failures but for leaks it should.

> one year of my life that my HVAC system didn't break down in some fashion

Something’s wrong here. I’ve only seen 1 partial failure (a refrigerant leak reduced efficiency by 5x, but the AC still worked) in the last 15 years across several houses. You’ve got an order of magnitude more failures.

Do you live on a boat? :P

Hydronic heating system[1] (hot water running under the floors) that was incompetently installed. No expansion tanks, wrong pipes used (no oxygen barrier so oxygen seeped in and rusted the cast iron pump), pressure wasn't balanced, just tons of issues.

My current house's HVAC system was also done piss poorly in places and there can be a 15 degree difference between rooms, so that's going to be 10k+ to fix. Fun times.

[1]Despite the obscene maintenance costs, the luxury is worth it. Warm floors are really nice!

Last year, one of the district heating pipes in my fairly new apartment block (7 years old) start leaking where it enters the building. Once discovered someone from the heating company came to turn off our supply, and then the next day they came to dig up the pavement outside and fix it.

On a side note, it seems like a very bad design choice to have that place be the room where all the electrical meters are. However even where there were large puddles of water over the floor it didn't cause any issues.

You kinda offer a solution by telling us about the annual inspections. There are also water alarms that go in the pan under a water heater for slow leaks.

I've also seen them placed in areas with tile floors and a drain just in case. Sounds like much of the decentralized system damage from water heaters is customer neglect.

Here in Norway we generally pay LESS when we have district heating.

Here in Poland we pay much LESS with district heating than decentralized one. If I would have to pay for decentralized heating of my flat, I'd need to use natural gas. But even before nat gas proces went to the moon, it was at least Here in Poland we pay much LESS with district heating than decentralized one 2x more expensive than district heating

Weird - natural gas was, up until last year, the cheapest of all options in Austria. My father used to pay more in base fees and taxes than the actual gas. For some people, prices now went up by x8, so it’s now the most expensive option. Many are looking into heat pumps + solar right now.

Polish district heating is mostly coal, hence the cost savings vs imported gas.

I think from what I heard the problem with district heating in Germany is quite complex and as said probably not one of energy efficiency. It very much is as I understand a problem for a non-functioning market and problems with centralised planning. Often people e.g. need to subscribe to a higher energy base amount than they need. As there is only one player in the market and consumption is mandatory, there is few incentives to drive down cost structures and scale better with demand.

I find district heating in Copenhagen to be good value, and it seems to be a good deal greeted.

https://celsiuscity.eu/district-heating-prices-highly-compet...

One reason Denmark has very affordable district heating is that it is based on "waste heat" from power plants, and "waste heat" is exempt of energy taxes (because those are paid on the primary energy sale, i.e. the electricity).

This comes with some perverse incentives in an age of renewables:

1. If the power plants use surplus electricity to provide district heating it is no longer a "waste product" and consequently taxed. Since the power plant cannot run without generating electricity, this leads to periods of negative power prices.

2. Cooling water from e.g. data centers is too cold for district heating, but it would be energy efficient to use heat pumps to extract that energy. This is not done, because the product would be subject to full energy taxes as it is not a waste product.

Wood burning ovens for heating in city area should not be allowed, that is just idiotic. The amount of deaths and health issues that is going to cause is really nasty.

Is your claim still true when air filters are installed in the chimney?

Wow, I never knew that chimney air filters existed. I guess I had assumed it would be impractical for a residential size chimney.

>As a German living in a city with mandatory district heating... the end result is to be that people seem pay more for heating than they would with a decentralised system.

True, my sister's family lives in a house with centralized heating and they pay 3-4 times more (!) per month compared to our home which simply uses an on-demand heater.

That sounds like some terrible bureaucracy coupled with some hybrid privatisation. I would be livid if my politicians allowed some company to profit off their de facto monopoly on a central heating grid.

The story of an efficient centralized system costing more than an inefficient decentralized one replays itself throughout the lives of Germans, resulting in impoverishment of the average German.

Germany is a very rich country with the poorest people in Europe. Germany has a huge amount of political and corruption problems and they are covered up well. You will be shocked by the tax rate too if you tried to earn an income. Median German households are the poorest in all of Europe. Don't just take my word for it either.

That sounds like way too much. Individual metering can't explain such a huge difference but I do wonder if they use that?

> What's nice about it, and maybe hard to quantify, is how this limits air pollution in the city.

It should be simple to quantify. If gas is used for heating I can't think there would be any improvement.

Local heating with a heatpump would be an improvement if the power supply mix is greener than gas only, maybe worse if the power is all coal.

So if the district heating system operates on as a "quasi business" (and AFAIK most Stadtwerke do even though they are publically owned), wouldn't it make sense to price close or at the price it would cost to use other heating. That maximizes the profit.

Yeah I'd hate having District heating. A friend had this in the past and she couldn't even regulate it. The house was way too hot for her.

It would not work for me as I usually have the house around 16 degrees C in winter. Needless to say my energy bill is very low :)

> Yeah I'd hate having District heating. A friend had this in the past and she couldn't even regulate it.

Interesting because I could regulate mine after all the radiators were replaced around 20 years ago.

And I kind of had to because the workers installing them made a mistake and I got the radiator meant for the living room, so it was grossly oversized for the space it heated.

That being said it's usually mandatory to keep them at least half-open considering that the heat is shared with other apartments.

I now live in a building from the early 90s and the knobs are all functional but I don't use them because the city pumps heat according to the weather outside.

> That being said it's usually mandatory to keep them at least half-open considering that the heat is shared with other apartments.

Yeah that was kinda the thing. She could technically close it but then the neighbours would complain.

I would hate that as most of the time I use no heating (or cooling) at all. Also, I wouldn't like to pay for it if I don't even use it.

PS: I live in a nicely mild-climated mediterranean coastal city so I can imagine "not using the heater" is not really a done thing if you live in Finland :)

That's only the case with really old apartments. I live in a fairly new apartment with district heating (7 years old) and each room has its own thermostat to control the underfloor heating.

This does not sound right. You can regulate district heating when it enters your house.

I have seen this several times in 1950s/1960s eastern bloc apartments.

I was only visiting, so I don't know if it was the original design, or if the valves have jammed.

This was standard in the Sowjet Union. If you think it’s too warm, you open the window.

In Finland, which this news article is about, typically in apartments, each radiator has a thermostat so you have very precise control. Also in houses. Further, each building has a heat exchanger.

Offices have multiple thermostats per floor.

That's not a thing here, everyone has controllable thermostats (Finland).

It really shouldn't stop from regulating temperature. It is basically two heat exchangers. One for local central heating which is then controlled by what ever thermostats you have connected and one for hot water...

Ofc, it the thermostats used are bad there might be problems.

District heating is a regional monopoly in Germany.