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Steam Networks
- nikodunk 2y agoThis is one of the coolest articles I’ve come across on HN ever. Also - it’s true steam punk (sorry).
- 6stringmerc 2y agoOne of my three favorite books growing up is relevant to this article. It’s also a great allegory about the passage of time and technology. Maybe worth picking up a copy…I still own mine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Shovel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_...
- static_int 2y agoSaas - Steam as a service
- ge96 2y agoPocket steam (carries a nuclear pellet around) just add water
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jasonthorsness 2y agoEven Seattle has one of these! And the University of Washington as well. It’s amazing that the economics holds up even today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company
- walrus01 2y agoVancouver as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Energy
- kridsdale1 2y agoAnd UBC
- jihadjihad 2y agoIndianapolis, too [0, 1]: > the second largest district steam system in the United States. The plant provides steam for heat and hot water to more than 200 commercial buildings and industries across downtown. Perry K's steam also helps power chilled water facilities which cool more than 60 large facilities around downtown. [1] I grew up going to downtown Indianapolis as a kid and was always freaked out by the steam emanating from the manholes and grates on the street. It turned out not to be an unfounded fear--they have occasionally exploded [2]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_K._Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_K._Generating_Station 1: https://info.citizensenergygroup.com/thermal/history https://info.citizensenergygroup.com/thermal/history 2: https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/locking-covers-installed-on-downtown-indianapolis-manholes https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/locking-covers-installed-...
- organsnyder 2y agoGrand Rapids, MI, too: https://www.vicinityenergy.us/blog/our-history-vicinity-energy-in-grand-rapids/#:~:text=Today%2C%20the%20steam%20distribution%20system,two%20miles%20of%20low%2Dpressure. https://www.vicinityenergy.us/blog/our-history-vicinity-ener...
- taurath 2y ago
- pbronez 2y agoTIL that steam distribution was invented in the USA around 1880, and is still used in NYC. Never occurred to me that “Steam Plants” literally produce steam for distribution. I thought that was a glib reference to the white smoke they produce!
- T-zex 2y agoI always thought watching films that steam in the dark streets was some cool 80s aesthetics. As in 'You are in this dark corner of the city where nobody can hear you' scary or edgy.
- triceratops 2y agoIt would be a shitty steam network that allowed steam to just leak.
- lxgr 2y agoSteam rising out of manholes is definitely commonplace in NYC: [1] There's a stretch of sidewalk in the Financial District that gets so hot that you can feel it walking past on some days. And apparently, sometimes these things explode... [2] As far as I've heard it's not (all) actual leaks, though, but rather water dripping on the exterior of the hot pipes carrying the steam itself being evaporated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explo...
- vel0city 2y agoIt's often not the steam pipes leaking. The sewers are very humid and warmer than the air above. As the air convects up it hits the cold air and the humidity condenses. The same thing happens in lots of other cities when the weather is right. Maybe the steam pipes keeps the sewers warmer in places with steam but they should be well insulated in the end.
- harrison_clarke 2y agoyou can see it pretty often in NYC, coming up from vents/pipes in the road i don't think it's steam leaking. it's drainage/sewer water being heated by the steam system (and other heat sources down there) enough that it evaporates and rises up to the street, and then condenses into vapor/fog because the street level is cooler
- maxwell 2y agoMarsh Island, Maine as well: https://umaine.edu/umec https://umaine.edu/umec
- pfdietz 2y agoThe temperature of this is such that industrial heat pumps are available to produce the steam. I don't imagine these are used in NY City, but they could be.
- mclau156 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- metadat 2y agoHow is mildew and mold avoided in the pipeline and interior spaces being heated by steam?
- darknavi 2y agoPretty sure the steam is ran through radiators and not just dumped directly into the air.
- lxgr 2y agoPart of it is definitely dumped directly into the air through an over-pressure valve on each radiator. At least that's been the case in all steam-heated NYC apartments I've ever visited or lived in. But what counteracts this is a loss in humidity caused by the heating of cold air from the radiator itself (cold air warmed up reduces relative humidity), and in my experience, this more than counteracts the little bit of steam hissing out of the radiator valve. As a side note, I've always wondered if the steam being vented that way is actually coming from the steam plant, or whether there's a heat exchanger somewhere in between that isolates a building's steam network from the distribution one (which is the case for liquid water heating, as far as I understand).
- mindslight 2y agonit: The valve is a thermostat that vents the air/steam in the radiator when it's not hot enough, letting new steam come in and replace it. This gets heat to the radiator quicker (over pure diffusion), and provides a mechanism of controlling its individual heat output. Of course, these valves are often broken.
- lxgr 2y agoInteresting, that explains why it's going off so consistently and makes a lot more sense than just avoiding overpressurization. Thank you!
- dangerlibrary 2y ago
- fulafel 2y agoToday's ConEd seems to lag environmentally on the generation side: still runs on fossil fuels, and only half of the steam is by cogeneration of heat and power. (Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system)
- MiscIdeaMaker99 2y agoIndianapolis also has a large steam network, with a prominent steam plant located in the southwest corner of downtown proper -- just down the street from Lucas Oil Stadium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_K._Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_K._Generating_Station
- coryk135 2y agoThis part really caught my attention: > in 1962, the anthracite seam under Centralia, PA – 25 miles to the west of Lehigh County – caught on fire and is still burning today.) That’s crazy to think that for over 60 years there’s been an underground coal mine on fire. I wonder how long the mines will burn for. The pictures on Google are quite interesting.
- Peanuts99 2y agoThere's Burning Mountain in Australia which has been burning for thousands of years.
- arrosenberg 2y agoAnd a burning crater in Turkmenistan that's been going since the 70s.
- 725686 2y ago6,000 years, according to Wikipeda. That is wild.
- jdwithit 2y agoYeah the Centralia story is wild. Who knows when the fire might ever go out? It's caught the imagination of many writers over the years, who have either been inspired by it or used it directly as a setting. Mostly in horror/paranormal content. As the Wikipedia entry notes "Centralia has been used as a model for many different fictional ghost towns and manifestations of Hell. Prominent examples include Dean Koontz's Strange Highways and David Wellington's Vampire Zero."
- coryk135 2y agoI was thinking about that. It sounds like a great setting for a story but I felt like I’d seen it before and I guess this is why.
- subpixel 2y agoI've been there. It's where my ancestors are from, and an area of PA where all the jobs and civic like burned up long ago as well. Not a fun region.
- lxgr 2y agoMy favorite fact about steam distribution systems is that they can be used for cooling, using either a steam-powered compressor or using adsorption refrigeration. At least the former seems to actually have been employed or at least studied as an option by ConEd in NYC: https://web.archive.org/web/20071008014254/http://www.coned.com/steam/PDF/May2_Seminar/HYBRID%20Cooling.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20071008014254/http://www.coned....
- Brian_K_White 2y agoSimilarly propane powered refridgerators.
- UltraSane 2y agoadsorption refrigeration has a really bad coefficient of performance, typically 0.3 to 0.7, while vapor compression systems get 3-5
- lxgr 2y agoAh, I was always wondering why they weren't more commonly used, but that's a pretty horrible coefficient of performance. I guess it's really only worth it if you want no moving parts for quiet or maintenance-free operation?
- UltraSane 2y agoI suppose if they can use waste heat they make sense.
- imglorp 2y agoThe article cites end-to-end efficiency as 60%. Plus the costs of maintaining steam generators and the pipe network. Electrical transmission systems are roughly 85% efficient to the consumer; together with boring old resistive electric radiators which are 100% efficient. So is there any reason to subscribe to the steam system for new construction?
- walrus01 2y agoIn terms of thermodynamics, a electric resistive heater is 100% efficient, but if the measurement is how many BTU of heating you can put into a room in a day with a certain amount of watt hours, a modern heat pump will always beat it. Also of course 100% electric.
- graemep 2y agoA heat pump is more than 100% efficient on that measure. I am not sure about "always". Does it not depend on the temperature difference? The use cases for steam seem to be where you need more than room heating though: the first paragraph mentions sterilising medical equipment, humidity control, and washing.
- walrus01 2y agoMy understanding is that it varies by temperature difference, but there's specialized series of heat pumps which work "okay" with very cold outside temperatures, even down to -25C, which are becoming popular to replace oil tank heating systems in Atlantic Canada. Apparently even when operating at -20C outside air they're still more efficient than electric baseboard heating. I don't know of any of the customers of the steam system in downtown Vancouver that use it for sterilization purposes, it connects almost exclusively large office towers. There's no hospital or medical facilities connected to it.
- yencabulator 2y ago> I am not sure about "always". Does it not depend on the temperature difference? My understanding: A heat pump is always better than resistive electric heating. Sometimes a outside air using heat pump needs to use extra energy to defrost the outside unit (with resistive electric heating). The defrosting is driven by sensors, but rarely happens more than e.g. once an hour for 5 minutes at a time. Heat pumps really do win over resistive electric heating on everything except initial cost, and that's not even hard -- resistive electric heating is very wasteful.
- MisterTea 2y agoPratt university in Brooklyn used to have a gentleman working there named Conrad Milster. He is a steam head and machinist who maintaining Pratts secret "working museum", a turn of the century steam generating plant for the campus. The plant also features two boilers, the original boiler which originally provided both heat and power and an additional boiler was added in the 30's to add capacity as the campus expanded. Milster also lived on campus in the old row houses. His was special, a full set of gauges and meters in his living room was plumbed to the plant so he could keep an eye on the boilers from he comfort of his home. He also said that steam from the plant not only heated the campus but a few buildings off campus that surrounded it. I never got to ask which buildings though. So there very well might be a little steam network in Brooklyn around Pratt. This is located in the basement of one of the buildings on campus. The power plant consists of three Ames Iron works single piston steam generators producing 120V DC fed to a marble switch board. Another piece is an early non-functioning steam turbine DC generator, WW2 era diesel generator from a battle ship. A 30HP motor-generator set used to provide 120V DC to the two service elevators in the building. And in the boiler room are numerous antique yet still functioning feed water pumps (the original steam driven feed water pumps actually do most of the work with newer electric pumps kept for standby) On the wall of the boiler room is a functional steam driven Ingersoll Rand air compressor. Amazing place. When I first visited in the 90's the MG set was still running providing power to the service elevators though they were replaced in the 00's leaving the MG set idle. There is also an old giant wood and brass Master clock in the office that was wired to every other clock on campus so whatever time you set on the master, the other clocks would then run super fact until they come around to the set time. It was running up to the 80's I think but Milster said a renovation crew hacked up all the wiring and no one ever bothered to fix it. Milster was fired a few years ago supposedly after he refused to remove the resident stray cats who lived in the plant (they even had their own little decorated doorway.) The reason being a union employee was allergic to the cats and kept complaining until they fired him. Shame because anyone who works with antique steam equipment knows Milster and hes full of ancient knowledge no one will ever regain. Edit: If you are into steam then look up Conrad Milster. I had the pleasure of talking to him a few times and he's such a nice and knowledgeable individual. He even started one of the 120V generators just for me after I said "Wish I could see it run" and he was like "sure" then opens a valve and slowly opens another to get it up to speed. Scary as the inertial lever arm bangs around loudly in the flywheel but then its goes near silent and hums away. Steam engines are very quiet.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago> The last total system failure was in 2007, when an 82-year-old pipe at 41st and Lexington exploded, showering Midtown in debris. Heavy rainfall had cooled the pipes, producing large amounts of condensate quickly, and a clogged steam trap meant that the system was unable to expel the water. When this build-up hit a critical level, the internal pressure shot up, causing the explosion. Almost fifty people were injured, and one woman died of a heart attack while fleeing The photo of this explosion makes it look huge. I wonder how much the pent up infrastructure work to avoid these issues would cost. Are water or gas pipes also vulnerable to this sort of thing?
- kibwen 2y ago> I wonder how much the pent up infrastructure work to avoid these issues would cost. The cost is essentially incalculable. Back in the 1800s people kept poor records of what they were stuffing under the streets, and the records that were kept were lost, and the ones that weren't lost are sitting in a box who knows where. NYC has effectively no idea what they're going to find under a street every time they tear one up, and the deeper you dig, the more you find.
- bluGill 2y agoCompressed gasses are worse than fluids. I'm not sure if a water pipe even can explode - as soon as the pipe shatters there is no more energy as the water isn't going to expand. Gases will expand in the explosion and drive the pipe parts to more energy. That isn't to say water/fluids are not dangerous. They can kill. However for the same pressure gases are much worse.
- jabl 2y agoThe city where I live has a district heating system using water, the temp in the mains is up to 130C or thereabouts. Occasionally there are failures, but they tend to be fairly undramatic. Due to the temperature the water flashes to steam when released. It's not recommended to go too close to the leak due to the risk of scalding from the hot water and steam. But no explosions like can happen with a hydraulic block in a steam system.
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- strgrd 2y agoHow common are district heating systems? Montpelier in Vermont uses wood stoves to deliver steam to a large part of their small downtown: https://www.montpelier-vt.org/427/Project-Background https://www.montpelier-vt.org/427/Project-Background
- quickthrowman 2y agoI live in Minnesota and both Minneapolis and St Paul have district heating and cooling systems in their downtown core areas. Cordia Energy operates the Mpls network and Evergreen Energy operates the St Paul network. I’m unsure what the fuel source is for the Mpls network but the St Paul network uses wood chips/wood waste and natural gas. Minneapolis: https://cordiaenergy.com/our-networks/minneapolis/ https://cordiaenergy.com/our-networks/minneapolis/ St Paul: https://www.districtenergy.com/ https://www.districtenergy.com/
- xattt 2y agoCharlottetown, a city of 38,000, has a waste-to-steam plant that heats the hospital, downtown and the university. The 30-year-old steam network springs leaks every so often, so you see gurgling hot springs from the ground. I’d love to know how much cheaper it would be to use this form of heating for my home compared to oil heat. (1) https://www.enwave.com/locations/pei.htm https://www.enwave.com/locations/pei.htm
- realityking 2y agoIncredibly common in continental Europe. Wikipedia has an overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
- m4rtink 2y agoYep, we have a big distric heating system here in Brno, Czech Republic - in operation since 1930, with 110 000 housholds & most big public and commercial buildings connected. It started as coal fired, but the modern system combines natural gas cogeneration (gas turbine -> steam turbine -> district heat) and waste incineration (that also includes a steam turbine to make some electricity). In the summer the waste incinerator provides all the necessary heat for the system alone. :) Eventually the city would like to make the system stop using natural gas, so there is a wood waste burning plant comming online at the end of this year & hot water pipeline is being built from the nearby Dukovany power plant. This two together should make the system natural gas indepedent in the future. :) While it started as steam based system & powered most of then very important textile industry, steam also has issues. Old pipes loose quite a bit of heat on the way (there used to be evergreen meadows even in winter in places above the old steam pipes), the pipes flex quite a bit when heating up/cooling, so they need to be placed on rollers in underground channels with U shaped sections to account for the pipe stretching/contracting. The steam also condenses & you need to get rid of that condensate on the way. And while unlikely, it is possible for a steam pipe to burst/explode, which is very dangerous for any bystanders. For these reasons & because the textile industry being much less important, the Brno district heating system is being converted to hot water distribution, which is quite a bit more effcient apparently. Reportedly, with modern insulated pipes, the heat loss on the way is negligeable, the pipes can be placed directly in the ground & they form a closed loop - no more mucking with rollers, condensante or explosions. So in a few years, the often seen steam ventilation pipes (from the various steam related texhnical spaces) around the city will be a thing of the past. :)
- UltraSane 2y agoThe Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant was built between 1973 and 1984 by the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) at a cost of approximately $6 billion. It was never put into use and was fully torn down in 1994. It stands as one of the most expensive industrial projects ever completed but never used for its intended purpose.
- jabl 2y agoThere's an interesting lecture about the New York city steam heating system by Dan Holohan at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nkgM0qCy5o4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nkgM0qCy5o4
- mschuster91 2y agoFun fact: it's not just small grids that run on steam - Munich's steam heating dates back to 1908 and since 2022 it's being reworked at massive expense to hot water to better accommodate geothermal and other renewable forms of heatpump based generation because these sources cannot get hot enough to produce supercritical steam [1]. [1] https://www.swm.de/dam/doc/geschaeftskunden/fernwaerme/flyer-umstellung-heizwassernetze.pdf https://www.swm.de/dam/doc/geschaeftskunden/fernwaerme/flyer...
- MattGrommes 2y agoGrowing up in Southern California and New Mexico, the first exposure I had to systems like this was in Cities Skylines. It boggled my mind that this type of thing was still used enough to feature in a modern simulator game until I started researching them and found them to be a great solution. Very interesting article.
- humptybumpty 2y agoCities Skylines was created by a Finnish company, where this is normal heating system.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoRelated: "The Lost Art of Steam Heating" by Dan Holohan (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18430512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18430512 (2018) Holohan argues that we've mostly lost competence at maintaining steam heating systems, and it's not that hard. The lack of understanding has led to many expensive and ineffective refurbishments.
- dylan604 2y ago"A recent study found that a fireplace pumps out 58 milligrams of particles under 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5s) per kilogram of firewood burnt. This means that every hour you spend in a room with a fireplace burning wood reduces your lifespan by about 18 minutes, equivalent to smoking 1.5 cigarettes" These kinds of stats really irritate me. Sure, smoking isn't great. Breathing in small particulates also isn't great. However, the 18 minutes is such a weird thing. There are so many people that have lived longer lives by smoking than people that work out all the time. There's just no real evidence this stat is true. You can't clone a person and sit one clone in the room with a fireplace, and then the other not in the room. Then watch which one dies first. The only test I've seen with evidence of one doing something the other doesn't was the twin brother astronauts where one went to space and the other did not.
- lucb1e 2y agoThat's why they don't look at 1 person but at aggregates. If the world was made of twins and triplets and they lived identical lives (nutrition, stress levels, air quality, ...) besides the 1 factor you're interested in (fireplace yes/no), that would be great for learning from, but of course that's not the case, not even for that astronaut I'd encourage you to open up one of these studies. The language in scientific papers is made to sound smart but it's still English (most of the time) and you'll see these sorts of things are established by looking at many people in many situations and then use maths to tease out how much each of the factors (living near a major road, for instance) contributes to the thing being investigated (such as longevity). Many of the factors, also depending on the number of people involved, will not turn out to be statistically significant, meaning that the error margins are too large to be sure. For smoking and woodfire particulates though, we're certain that it's unhealthy to within extremely low error margins. Whether that's precisely 18 minutes: probably not, but presumably that's our best guess, even if it has uncertainty associated with it. The paper is linked literally within the quote you gave, if you want to check how uncertain the value is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352710223020284 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235271022... Skimming this one, they didn't establish the relation between particulate matter and lifespan themselves but they cite other studies that did this: > correlating average PM2.5 levels during a shorter time interval and the average life expectancy during that same time period. In Taiwan, this method used data from 17 counties for the 2010 to 2017 period and resulted in a DLE factor of 0.798 years per 10 μg/m3-increase in exposure to PM2.5 [50]. Using data from 545 counties in the United States for between 2000 and 2007 [51] and data from 214 cities in China for between 2013 and 2017 [52], resulted in lower DLE factors: 0.14 and 0.18 years, respectively, per additional 10 μg/m3 of exposure to PM2.5. If you doubt those methods, you should click through to sources 50, 51, and 52. This study just measured the amount of PM2.5 in three situations and then multiplied it with that value from the other studies (I didn't read far enough to see which one they ended up picking, that should be mentioned somewhere if you want to know/check it precisely), and that's how they get to this value > There's just no real evidence this stat is true. They don't just pull stats from thin air. If you think they made a mistake somewhere and arrived at the wrong number, I'm curious to hear where they went wrong, and the authors would probably be happy to be get an even better stat as well
- kayo_20211030 2y agoAn incredibly interesting piece. I live in NY, but didn't know the history. This did make me chuckle > reduces your lifespan by about 18 minutes As George Carlin said, "yeah, but it's the last 18 minutes".
- blueflow 2y ago> Traditional fireplaces are immensely inefficient, drawing in 300 cubic feet of air per minute for combustion and expelling up to 85 percent – along with the heat – up the chimney. So the other 45 cubic feet exhaust per minute go where? Into the rooms to suffocate the people there?
- Rooster61 2y agoAlso, isn't that heat only convection? This doesn't seem to take into account the fact that brick or stone fireplaces absorb heat and then radiate it back into the room. It's not all about moving hot air. The fireplace itself gets hot and that feeds back into the room through radiative heat.
- twic 2y agoNew Yorkers love putting things in pipes, don't they? Not content with putting normal things like water, sewage, and gas in pipes, they apparently put steam in pipes, on Roosevelt Island they put a mix of rubbish and vacuum in pipes [1], they used to put the post in pipes [2], apparently they pipe rats to people's houses or something, occasionally once of them puts gunpowder in a pipe [3], and they even put themselves in pipes [4]. It's all very Freudian, they should talk to their therapist about it. [1] https://www.untappedcities.com/inside-roosevelt-islands-futuristic-pneumatic-tube-trash-system/ https://www.untappedcities.com/inside-roosevelt-islands-futu... [2] https://www.untappedcities.com/pneumatic-tube-mail-new-york-city/ https://www.untappedcities.com/pneumatic-tube-mail-new-york-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway