• Septimaeus@infosec.pub
    70·
    7 days ago

    Old steam heating system. They vent it when they’re working on a section.

    Side-note: surprised by all the fellow New Yorkers i’m seeing in this thread. I thought yous were still at the other place.

      • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
        12·
        7 days ago

        Yeah it’s common enough I figured most knew, but a few years ago I went ice skating at the bryant park rink with someone who refused to walk anywhere near the steam. They thought it was toxic and didn’t accept my explanation, so we had to walk an extra few blocks to get around the steam work. Shrug

      • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
        7·
        6 days ago

        That’s a good idea! My understanding is that the old steam network is slated for decommission and replacement by this program, basically a large distributed geothermal heat pump network that also harvests from major heat producers like data centers and provides both heating and cooling.

        It will end the era of the steamy-street Sin City aesthetic but should be many, many times more efficient than the old steam system. Phase-change thermal transfer in HVAC systems is nearing 400% efficiency, so 4 times more efficient than the theoretical limit of direct heating, because it only uses the energy necessary to move heat from one place to another rather than produce it, and it works for both heating and cooling.

        Right now I believe they’re piloting the system in NYCHA buildings (public housing) of neighborhoods outside the old steam network, like Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, but supposedly the plan is to expand to the rest of Manhattan.

        Edit: corrected coefficient of performance

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
    484·
    7 days ago

    Some big cities originally heated their buildings by producing steam in one one centralized building and delivering it to large buildings thru pipes underground. The steam you see is from leaking pipes in this antiquated infrastructure. It’s a very inefficient method if you ask me. Cities should offer these buildings low interest loans so they can update and be independent but they never take my advice

    • Wahots@pawb.social
      16·
      6 days ago

      District level heating is actually pretty efficient, some universities do the same thing on purpose to save on bills. Our relatively young city does it with the downtown skyscrapers for the same reason.

      The other nice thing is that when you upgrade the heating system to be less carbon intensive, you can instantly have a ton of buildings all jump instantly to fewer emissions too.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
      201·
      7 days ago

      Afaik it’s not inefficient if the heating is done via fossil fuels as big furnaces (especially in the past, especially turbo-fan super-fine grind coal ones) are much more efficient than smol ones for individual buildings (even if the buildings are giant).

      • Hikermick@lemmy.world
        5·
        7 days ago

        It’s terribly inefficient. The efficiency is lost when the steam that condenses back into hot water is lost and none of it is returned to the boiler to be reheated. Rather than reheating this returning water which normally is at 120-160 degrees Fahrenheit, fresh water is used which in the winter here is around 56 degrees. Aside from this the cold water taken in contains impurities such as dissolved gasses which cause corrosion and dissolved minerals which can cause scaling that acts as an insulator raising the amount of energy needed to heat the water.

        • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
          2·
          6 days ago

          Oh, I didn’t know it was a one-way system in NY.
          A weird decision, but I guess it lowered the initial cost a bit?

          • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
            2·
            6 days ago

            The difficulty was drainage. Isolated steam systems in steam era construction were designed to use gravity for condensate collection. It’s one of the reasons boilers are always in the basement of old buildings.

            Steam system engineering was a well-compensated profession. A well-designed system would accurately predict the rate of condensate flow for every part of the building, prior to construction, and reflect these predictions in the slope/grade and diameter of the steam pipes. Inaccurate predictions resulted in problems like pipe knock (aka steam hammer) which you can often hear when you or a nearby neighbor partially close the shut-off valve of a radiator.

            Since construction in the city had many elevations and could not be predicted in advance, there was no equivalent solution to facilitate condensate collection. The system had to be one way. And yes, it’s inefficient compared to modern systems, but was innovative in its day.

          • Hikermick@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 days ago

            I can’t speak for NY but that is the situation in Cleveland. I have a customer downtown on city steam. I watch hot water discharge to a drain at the rate of about 3 gallons a minute and there’s 1440 minutes in a day. When it was built I’m sure they reclaimed most of it (80% return is considered good) but over time the pipe corrodes and you have leaks.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
      21·
      7 days ago

      Why not just have the city mandate the upgrades and then implement them? It’s probably not that big of a problem for everyone involved.

      • Hikermick@lemmy.world
        61·
        7 days ago

        If it were that simple everyone would have done it by now. This method of heating your building is very expensive. Long story short, I’m in the HVAC business and two of my customers have made themselves independent. One was a private property management company that gutted an empty building and was successful, the other is a federal building that hired a private company to convert over and got screwed.

        • _stranger_@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 days ago

          I made the same suggestion you did, all I changed was that the city pay for and implement the changes instead of handing out money to random people in the form of loans that may or may not get anything done.

  • Ross@lemmy.world
    6·
    5 days ago

    Ah yes, the classic New York fog machine. Turns out it’s not for dramatic effect—just the city’s 19th-century steam system still doing its thing. Who needs modern infrastructure when you’ve got built-in Gotham vibes?

  • Notorious_handholder@lemmy.world
    206·
    6 days ago

    You know how when rockets take off in Florida there’s lots of smoke?

    Yeah there’s a tunnel that goes from Florida to New York that the smoke goes through to help heat up the New York streets. So anytime you see smoke in New York it’s cause a rocket was recently shot up in Florida. Technology Infrastructure is incredible!