"Jinx" wrote:
>> NZ has centralized hot water?
>
> Yes. We're all issued with insulated buckets and ration cards

Most Soviet-era apartment buildings still rely on it, and it sucks. Some 
bureaucrat controls when to turn your heat on, and when to turn it off -- so 
it's either too hot, or too cold.

I still can't figure out why they did it this way. Perhaps, because the hot 
water is basically free? AFAIK, it came from the coal-fired power plants, 
which would otherwise waste the excess heat in a cooling tower.

I remember a couple of surreal images a few years after the collapse of 
USSR, when the infrastructure began to break down. A huge hot water pipe 
broke, and for several weeks the water was pouring into a local canal. 
Winter city landscape, with clouds of steam rising from the small river...

In another instance, a smaller underground pipe supplying hot water to a 
school developed a leak, resulting in a green oasis of grass and blooming 
irises in the school backyard, in the middle of the winter.

Vitaliy 

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