Hot water hiatus 2025
Something I wrote about last year
I wrote a bit last year about how, for many Russians, summer is a time when it can be expected that hot water will be turned off for a period of time. Our apartment last year, as I wrote about in that posting, was without hot water for about 2 weeks. As indicated in the notice above that appeared the other day at our new apartment, the same will happen again this year at our new residence which, though in the same general area of the city is about 2 kilometers east of where we were living last year.
As I mentioned in last year’s post, a seasonal disruption in the supply of hot water, as provided by central utility systems, has been a standard feature of life here for decades. Many apartment dwellers are expecting this annually—especially those living in buildings built prior to about 1990. As may be apparent, 1990 is a cut-off date that coincides with the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which point more western-style apartment buildings started to be built, meaning buildings in which apartments had their own separate hot water and heating systems or wherein each building had its own separate physical plant. Many buildings built prior to that date rely on neighborhood physical plants which supply hot water for both heat and tap uses for areas spanning many blocks.
There are here, as just indicated, some apartments that have their own water heaters—usually of the sort that are called in the U.S. on-demand/tankless water heaters. Those, obviously, are not really affected by the hot water disruption. We do intend to buy an apartment here at some point—hopefully sooner than later. And at such time as we do, we may well have hot water supplied independently in such a way. But for the time being we wind up living with whatever sort of hot water the apartment building in which we are living supplies.
One thing I neglected to mention in my previous article on this topic that is relevant to hot-water shutoff here is the fact that many apartment dwellers are looking to get out of the city and into the countryside during the summer months. This is a custom that has been in force for decades here. Many tend to spend as much time as possible in some seasonal summer cabin that they own in some village within reasonable distance from the city, where they do things like gardening and mushroom hunting. Those who don’t have work responsibilities during the summer, for example those working in education, as well as retirees will typically try to spend the entirety of the summer months at their dacha, coming back to the city only for urgent meetings, physician appointments and things of that nature. So this is another factor, apart from temperature considerations, in the decision to target summer months for the shutdown and maintenance of the many municipal boilers that supply hot water to so many of the neighborhoods of this city.
I have mentioned a couple of times “apartment dwellers” in this post. But reflecting further on that phrase, I realize I need to point out that this phrase describes practically all residents of this, and of other Russian cities. In other words, the single-family home—or even duplex or quadplex or the like— so familar to citizens of other countries simply do not exist in Russian cities of any size. Rather, cities tend to be comprised almost entirely of block after block of large apartment buildings, the only exception being the pre-revolutionary palaces that were built by the aristocracy prior to 1917. These, of course—though paling in size as compared to large apartment buildings—are quite large buildings in their own rite, but they were essentially built for a single family. Most of these have now been converted into museums or perhaps meeting or business centers and the like, but a few do seem to have been acquired by the nouveau-riche and converted into private residences.
I started writing this post prior to the shutoff date but, as predicted, the hot water in our unit and in many other units in our neighborhood has now been shut off. So things went as predicted in the notice except for the fact that the shutoff occurred, not at noon as the notice advertised, but at 11 A.M. So, splash baths for us for the next couple of weeks.
On the weather: I can say with confidence that we have seen 10 days or less of 70-degree-plus temperatures since our arrival a little over 2 months ago, and that on none of those days did the temperature exceed 80 degrees. So the cool temperatures continue. This is turning out to be a quite different summer than the last two were, much cooler and more rainy. Temperatures this week have been in the 60’s, with today’s high temperature being not much above 60.