According to the law (the Ordinance of the Minister of Economy of the 15th of January 2007), the heating season is ‘the period in which weather conditions make it necessary to deliver heat continuously to buildings and other facilities.” However, its start date and end date are not specified. Everything depends on the weather. In practice, heating begins in September or October and lasts till April or even May. It is assumed that building administrators turn heating on when the air temperature falls below 10 degrees for at least 3 days (this situation has not occurred in this season so far) and below 16 degrees in flats.
As in the previous year, the autumn begins mildly. According to the data of Fortum – the owner of the municipal heating network, the quantity of heat delivered in the last quarter of 2014 was almost 10% lower than in the analogous period in 2013. However, let’s remember that the last year’s winter was extremely warm. In the heating season 2014/2015, Wroclaw inhabitants needed 8% less heat than the average quantity for the last three seasons. ‘The average air temperature was 5.6 Celsius degrees last winter,’ says Jacek Uhryn from Fortum. The highest quantity of heat – approx. 50,800 GJ – was delivered on 28 December of the last year. It was one of the coldest days of the last winter. The average day temperature was minus 6.7 degrees at that time.From October 2014 till March 2015, Fortum delivered approx. 5.3 million GJ of heat to the Wroclaw network, which is 0.5 milion GJ less than the average quantity for the previous three seasons.
This year’s season has not started for good yet, but housing co-operatives are already prepared for it. ‘I remember one season when we turned heating on at the beginning of September and turned it off in the middle of May,’ says a person from the Metalowiec Housing Co-operative in Wroclaw. ‘We keep observing the weather and we’re happy that the beginning of the autumn is warm.’
