Pipes older than grandmothers: the expert explained why the heating works halfway

Residents of Russian homes for a long time can be difficult to warm up in the heating season. The reason is worn utility networks, the age of some pipes reaches 90 years. This was told by a member of the Committee on entrepreneurship in the field of housing and utilities of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Russia Konstantin Krokhin in an interview with NSN.

According to the expert, utilities can not always heat the batteries at full capacity. In homes where networks are in critical condition, too high a temperature can lead to an accident. In some settlements, the depreciation of municipal infrastructure reaches 90%. However, it is not updated quickly enough.

Krokhin noted that back in 2024, the Accounts Chamber pointed to a serious gap between the pace of renewal and wear of networks. According to him, municipal infrastructure is updated by about 0.9-1.9% per year, while its wear is from 3 to 5% annually. As a result, problems have been accumulating for decades.

Another reason for the lack of thermal power, according to the expert, is due to the fact that the old boiler houses were designed for five-storey houses. Today, modern high-rises have appeared near them, the needs of which are much higher.

Earlier, by the way, federal media wrote that the Russian government will allocate 20 billion rubles to prepare for possible accidents at housing and communal services.

Meanwhile, in the Tula region, this problem is also acute. For example, earlier “MK in Tula” wrote that the Tula region has approached the moment when pipes, designed for 50 years of operation, in many places have exhausted their resource. The governor of the region Dmitry Milyaev spoke about this at a meeting with village elders and TOS leaders in Efremov.

Milyaev noted that the service life of the pipes is about 50 years, and centralized updating of the communal system for a long time was practically not engaged in. Since 2018, trunk water conduits have been shifted in Tula. The governor explained that damage to one such pipe could leave a large part of the city without water, as many of them were laid more than 40 years ago. According to him, the replacement of main and local water conduits lays the foundation for reliable water supply for many years, but it is impossible to completely solve the accumulated problems quickly.