Almost all hot water in Moscow is piped in (hot) from the street?.. or am I mis-reading his article?
Keeping Cool in the Summer, the Russian Way
If that’s the case, isn’t that wildly inefficient energy use wise?
Moscow has centralized steam heat so they don’t need water heaters most of the time:
Same thing in Bucharest, Romania. There’s a hot water pipe coming in, which (in 1996, at least) had hot water in it about 10 hours a day. Regular folks didn’t have hot water heaters, so it was always a surprise whether or not you would have a hot shower.
The federal government’s buildings in downtown Washington, D.C. are also heated by a central steam plant. I was told that it is more energy efficient, but requires planning and foresight.
Manhattan too. See this Straight Dope Staff Report: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mstreetsteam.html
In Reykjavik , Iceland they have the added advatage of having the hot water come straight out of the ground and piped to houses :-
Yup, absolutely true and a bloody pain in the ass it is too. We just went through the annual 3-week shut off (for profilaktichesky remont, or preventative maintenance). A lot of people I know plan their summer vacations to avoid the shut-off period as much as possible. Having to heat up water for shaving and sponge baths is not a lot of fun, especially if your water is shut off in May when it get down close to freezing at night.
As far as I know it’s not just Moscow, but all over the country.
Despite what the Staff Report said, it’s majorly inefficient if you don’t take proper care of the system (guess what happens in Russia? bingo). Even with the annual maintenance, the Moscow system loses anywhere from 10-15% of its water due to leaks. There have been a couple of cases of major leaks and ruptures, with boiling sinkholes developing and swallowing cars whole (and, in one instance a year or so ago, killing a man and his son when the ground they were walking on suddenly turned into a muddy cauldron 
).
Apparently they’re gradually switching from metal pipes to PVC ones, which last better and will eliminate the need for annual overhauls.
At last report, the switchover should be complete sometime late this century :rolleyes: .
I must find occasion to use that word. 
I lived a few years in Russia and I agree it is a huge pain in the butt. It usually seems to last longer than 2-3 weeks. When I lived in Novosibirsk it seemed to go on the whole summer.
Let me tell you people (including myself) start to get RIPE. That is one lonnngggg bus ride in the summer heat with no one having had a proper shower in weeks.
Bobby Fischer always wore a condom during tournaments. He was an early practitioner of “safe chess” AKA profilaktichesky. 
The city of Hibbing, MN also supplies hot water and steam heat to residents of town (at least the central part of town, I’m not sure what happens with newer homes). During a college choir tour, we did a home stay with a family in town. They warned us that if we turned on the hot water, for a shower or to wash up, to give it a five-count before getting in/putting hands under the stream. Apparently it is pretty damn hot in the pipe, and the first shot is even more so.
The City I lived in in Sweden (Borås) had a similar system where the electricity generation was at least partly fueled by burning flammable wastes and the excess heat generated as a by-product was used to provide hot water and central heating to the majrity of buildingd in the town and underground heating in the town centre to keep the pavements ice-free in winter.
It was quite efficient, reasonably cheap-or at least cost-effective. In the ten years I spent there I was never aware of any outages at all, they probably ran parrallell redundant systems. I actually lived 100 yards from the plant which was amazingly clean and quiet in operation.
Coming from sixties England, the abundance of heat and hot water was a revalation as was the almost free electricity.
Hmmm…it took the bulk of the summer to get them “maintained” the time i was in Novosibirsk too. Ulan Ude was even worse, however!
Likewise. (This was 1995, by the way.)
Sometimes, if we begged the dezhurnaya (dorm attendant) enough, she would let us take a really shallow hot bath by boiling a couple tubs of water and putting it in one of the (very rare) bathtubs. Otherwise, lemme tell ya, cold showers are no fun, even in summertime.
(More linguistic trivia, somewhat relevant here: in Novosibirsk – actually, in Akademgorodok, the university city 45 min. or so outside of town - they gave us what were supposed to be the nicer accommodations. During the school year, our “dorm” was used as a treatment center for tubercular children, or profilaktoriya. It’s the only reason the building had a few semi-normal bathtubs.)
Although most hot water in Manhattan (and western Queens, which also has steam) is provided by gas-fired water heaters. The steam is used to heat lots of buildings, though. If your radiator blows a gasket in the middle of the winter, you have a free sauna.
I am not familiar with the district heating system in Moscow, but in most US cities that have district heating, it is efficient use of energy even if you lose 15% from leaks. That is because the energy sent out to heat buildings is for the most part waste heat from the production of power. If it were not sent out to houses, a large portion of it would be sent out to cooling towers and wasted to the environent. Or, if you want to look at it another way, when they produce heat for the city, they get free power as a side effect. Many large universities have central heating plants that also generate power for them.
Some district heating is however still run just as heating system with no power production. Then the only benefit you get is the ability to burn alternate fuels such as coal that you would not be able to burn in your house easily.
Modern, well designed systems have piping looped around such that sections of piping can be taken out of service and repaired with no loss of service to the customer. Not too surprising that this was not a large priority in Soviet Russia.
Up until around 30 years ago, the state of the art top dollar method to install piping was to put it in a walkable tunnel. We have piping that is 90 years old still in service in tunnels. Any other method that did not involve tunnels had no more than a 30 year trouble free life span even over here, so you can’t blame the Soviets too much for the piping needing repair now. Modern hot water distribution piping is generally Polyethylene, and should have a very long life.
Squink, that was inspired!
Fascinating reply! What do you do for a living - is this (somewhat esoteric) knowledge related to your career?
Waste heat is a profitable commercial commodity in many areas of the country, sold to nearby businesses, if not individual homeowners, and often transported by steam pipes. College and company campuses are particularly likely to use piped steam - cluster of buildings and the land between them, all under a single ownership, can make it cost effective to build fuel-consuming (but high efficiency) dedicated steam plants. The same can apply to a region of a town.
Throwing large amounts of energy away through costly, unslightly, and sometimes environmentally disruptive industrial cooling towers is almost irresponsible, if that energy could be put to use nearby. It’s unfortunate that it’s not workable to pipe hot steam from our current nuclear plants (due to issues of reactor cooling control, public fear, and distance to densely inhabited regions); it would significantly add to their effective power useful power output. [The debate over whether we should have nuclear power plants belongs elsewhere]
When I lived in Cambridge, Mass., just over a decade ago, a steam generation plant went on-line using the heat from a refuse incineration plant. That kind of ‘cogeneration’ doesn’t get the coverage it did in the post Energy Crisis 80s. but it is still being designed into many industrial and municipal facilities aroun the US.
Yes. I work for a large midwestern University Utility department. Get to play with sewage and steam. Just about the most unglamorous engineering there is to be done.
As KP indicates, this setup is great if you have a high density of use such as a college campus or a downtown area. It is a very high up front capital cost system though.