That's the steam from the melting pot
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Volcanism
Steam from the steamed hams we're having
Believe it or not. Very old infrastructure in the city. Still runs on steam power.
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I immediately thought of this tune for some reason.
This is the tune I thought of (apologies for linking a YT short, but it was the only version I could find)
There's also a longer YT Music version here, but I'm not sure if it's a premium thing or not.
That's not smoke. It's a space station.
That's no moon, it's... oh, wait... shit.
See it in Kansas City usually in the winter.
The CHUDs are having a BBQ. Guess the markets closed for the day.
I think it's important, at this point, to differentiate between NYC CHUDs, and your common racist shitbag chud. NYC CHUDs are many things, but not racist dickbags.
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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.
I wonder if they could make it more efficient by running at a lower temperature and installing water source heat pumps in buildings. https://youtu.be/abGiNL9IT54
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Yep. Detroit has this, too.
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
Something's happening in Zaun.
Teenage mutant ninja turtles barbeque
That's just from the ruins of Old New York that New York is built on top of. The mutants down there are a steampunk society.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.