My new build flat in London has district heating like you describe. It's a complete nightmare and I wish I could get rid of it. Firstly, it's incredibly expens

My new build flat in London has district heating like you describe. It's a complete nightmare and I wish I could get rid of it. Firstly, it's incredibly expensive. There's no regulation on the price you can charge for heat, and there's no competition for supply like gas and electric. So the apartment freehold owners charge eye watering fees for it. I could save probably 50-75% a month even paying for the cost on a new boiler, plus a service package. Secondly, there are a lot of outages. Much more than I've ever experienced with standard boilers. The outages are quite literally out of your control, unlike a gas/electric boiler where you can get someone to fix it out of hours. One particularly bad outage was nearly 48 hours in winter over a weekend, caused by incompetent building management and a seeming inability to get highly specialised parts from Germany to the UK to fix it on a weekend. I've obviously had normal boilers break down but usually they can be fixed in a couple of hours, at least temporarily enough to get a proper fix sorted.