If you don’t want to close the valve on your steam radiator see if the owner will install a TRV, Con Ed gives them out free/cheap & it’s a 5 minute install.

They go where the air valve is now & work the same way, except they have a wax seal that closes when the room is too warm. After a cycle or two when the radiator can’t vent the air it will keep most of the steam from entering.

If some villain noticed it was too hot & put a piece of electrical tape over the vent it would keep 90% of the steam from entering.

This is true to an extent, steam can be an absolute bitch to balance.

A lot of the one pipe steam in NYC was designed for coal boilers which came to temperature & pressure very slowly compared to the efficient gas boilers currently installed.

You are way out of spec from “design” already. I don’t know what the theory of why it matters is, but in practice it does not matter much or all of the time.

Hell, con Ed will give you TRVs which close off a radiator about as effectively as if the valve is closed, the boiler can’t tell the difference

Probably, I don't see why it wouldn't work. If you have a vent for air plugging it will trap air. If air is trapped a minimal amount of steam will get in.

I also don't see any risk for damage, but I've never even seen 2 pipe steam in person.

I know about one pipe steam because I've had to fix 20 problems with my 120+ year old building.

I think 2 pipe steam is more common in the EU one pipe lets steam in, one pipe lets water out. NYC has a lot of one pipe steam.

There are enough ways to deliver heat to a radiator it's impossible to make comparisons without knowing which is which.

This is dumb advice which makes tons of assumptions.

Are they talking about one pipe steam or two or anything else?

For one pipe steam the valve needs to be fully open so that the condensation can drip back down the riser, it's also why your radiator needs to be raked towards the riser too.

You have to keep the valve fully open or fully closed, it's not a temperature control. You can install a special vent called a TRV which gives you some control though. A steam radiator needs to let air out so steam can come in, the TRV has an expanding seal so that when the room is warm enough it will trap air.

If you want to turn off your radiator & don't have access to the valve (or you just got it to stop leaking & don't want to mess with it) you can just cover the valve with tape. After a cycle or two your radiator will only have room for trivial amounts of steam.

TLDR

the valve between the pipe & the radiator needs to be full open or full closed. The gospel of dry steam. Opening windows to control temperature is a dick move

>you could do that today

What kind of machinery can harvest 3 sisters?

Much less anything more complicated, or crops that don’t harvest at the same time.

I think eventually there will be a revolution in robotic farming.

Make a 3D grid of alternately charged DC wires to both supply power & rails to robots.

Crops are currently optimized to the machinery which plants & harvests them. With extensible & flexible machinery there isn't even a reason to have a monocrop fields, you could grow 3 sisters as easily as corn if you wanted.

Denser & more varied crops would reduce the stress of pests and your drones running 24/7 could just mechanically kill most of them.

When you do need pesticide or fertilizer it can be applied directly, dramatically reducing runoff.

Same as water, you could just inject it into the ground around the roots a few oz at time. It probably takes 10 oz to get 1 oz where you actually need it.

The coolest benefit will be continual harvest, there is no need to plant & harvest the whole field at once. You can just pluck what is ready for market & plant where a spot opens up

You could have an orchard with a dozen different fruits & grow corn below them with beans & other viney plants using them both as structure. Below all that where there is no light you could grow mushrooms.

You'd ultimately be limited by light & that can be supplemented too.

Ending corn subsidies would do a ton of good too, It's amazing that artificially cheap corn has been shoe-horned into every part of our life. From corn syrup is everything to ethanol in our gas

How much is improved yield & how much is increased prices?

If I was the trash Czar & building this infrastructure I'd schedule dumpsters to be emptied when they are near full instead of on a schedule, triggered by LoRaWAN sensors.

So you'd pick up the full dumpsters & the total collections wouldn't rise because you could leave the not-full dumpsters longer.

You can't compare one time infrastructure costs to ongoing annual costs. Even a small increase in trash efficiency will pay for major outlays in a decade. Not to mention the quality of life improvements too numerous to be quantifiable.

Lets say the infrastructure costs a billion dollars... That's 6 months of the sanitation budget. a 5% increase in efficiency would pay for itself in one decade and pay dividends for the next 90

>How often the city pick up your trash?

3 times a week, pretty much everywhere in all of NYC

NYC is super dense underground, but you only need one dumpster per block. It's not a big deal if people have to carry their trash bags an extra 20 feet

There isn't one size fits all solution for the whole city, my block does have an alley that can hold dumpsters, ones that don't can get an underground dumpster, ones that don't can get an above ground dumpster

Sure it does.

Other cities don't have nearly the same problem with rats & they spend a lot less per capita to control them.

Loose bags are a buffet, 7 days a week there is unlimited food for rats. Bins make a giant difference

Official bags won't make a difference, no bags are hungry rat proof. Even if half as much trash was generated it wouldn't have the least impact in the pest population. Even with zero trash rats could be sustained on roaches, pigeons, people who feed pigeons & incidental littering/dropped food.

NYC doesn't make any more trash than most other places & less than most places in the US.

The issue is the lack of alleys to place dumpsters. Any bin comes at the cost of sidewalk

NYC needs an underground dumpster on every block with a false bottom trashcan on top.