It's Getting Cold

It's well known, the best form of home heating is hot water or steam radiators. Places where I lived in the past had one heater for normal water and a broiler for radiation, my apartment in Italy has one water heater for everything.

 And since it is Italian, it is made by a company called Lamborghini, this happens to be the Lamborghini Taura.  This weekend I decided it was time to turn on the heat and needed to figure out how to do that.

 Basically, up to now I have had hot water in my apartment and to turn on the radiation all I have to do is turn the button in the middle.  At least, that's what my landlord told me.  But I'm always concern that I'm going to touch that button and end up having no hot water or heat.

 The instruction are all in Italian.

 But the manual did include a cool image about how cold water enters the heat exchanges and leaves being hot.  But looking at this graph I thought to myself, 'yeah, I can mess this up.'

My apartment does have these cool new style radiators, they seem very efficient.

 When I turned the middle button on the Lamborghini nothing happen.  It turns out I also need to set the temp on the thermostat too.

 Last time I had a steam radiation system was back in Chicago.  These radiators were straight up cast iron from the 1920's, there is almost nothing better to keep you warm in the winter.  But this system did not have a thermostat, you just needed to turn on the broiler.   Which in itself was an engineering marvel, like having the heart of a steam engine in your basement.