I kept expecting to stumble on a successful miner's new house or a night-club owner's comfortable, heated apartment.
As we talk, Karlung tells me about a deal he has with Fortum, which is a Swedish energy provider: Instead of channeling the heat from the servers through vents and tossing it into the open air, Fortum uses the runoff to heat apartment blocks in Stockholm.
Water is pumped from the boreholes and used to heat apartments and provide hot water.
The capacity of nine homeless shelters can be expanded if needed, the agency said, and reminded everyone that landlords are required by law to heat apartments to 68 Fahrenheit during the day and 66 at night.
New York City requires landlords to heat apartments to at least 68 degrees between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. when it is cooler than 55 degrees outside, and to at least 55 degrees between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. when the outside temperature falls below 40.
When we lived in New York, heat escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours; nowadays, many of the Btus produced by our brand-new, extremely efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.
In 1936, after a law was passed requiring that tenement buildings have a staircase made of metal rather than wood, the upper floors of No. 96 were closed off and used for storage, which was apparently more economical than making the required renovations and heating the apartments.
As a small child in the 1930s, he remembers, he would put coal in the potbellied stove that heated their apartment.
In the late afternoon, "the sun is completely blinding and heats the apartment up to just about sweltering and you can't really see anything because of the glare," Mr. Kingston said.
To heat the apartment and the water, Ms. Scholtus purchased an efficient condensing gas boiler, which she tucked into the closet on her terrace where the toilet once lived.
