St. Petersburg residents may experience shorter hot water shutdowns in the future, but complete elimination is unlikely in the near term. Vice Governor Sergei Kropachev addressed the St. Petersburg parliament on June 11th, discussing the persistent issue of summer hot water outages and potential solutions.

Kropachev explained that annual scheduled maintenance is essential for all heat sources, necessitating the complete shutdown of equipment to perform necessary work on boiler systems.

However, the duration of these shutdowns can be reduced to 1-4 days in areas with sufficient reserve capacity to switch subscribers to alternative systems. He cited the Nevsky, Frunzensky, Moskovsky, and Krasnoselsky districts as examples where this has already been achieved. These areas only experience hot water limitations during hydraulic testing.

Kropachev noted that the absence of reserve heating mains and boiler houses in the original Soviet-era city planning presents a challenge. Constructing these reserve systems as part of heating system reconstruction is a solution, with ongoing work in the Primorsky district since 2022 already showing results in reduced shutdown durations.

While acknowledging that this process is expensive and time-consuming, Kropachev did not provide a specific timeline for when the city might fully transition to one-day shutdowns.