What's the downside of the central hot water? (Or heating.)
I've lived in buildings with this, and others (houses) without, and I much prefer the former. There's nothing I need to maintain, and the 'big' version seems to be more reliable than the single-house-sized heating equipment. The one time I remember the hot water being repaired, the janitor stuck up a note explaining that due to some sort of redundancy we'd still have hot water, but it would be less hot than it was supposed to be.
This wouldn’t be true in modern buildings, but in our case the hot water supply isn’t reticulated, and I’m at the ‘end of a (pipe) line’ so if no-one else sharing the same hot water pipe as me has run their hot water taps for a while, it can take 4 minute to get hot water in the shower.
This was bought up in a body corporate meeting several years ago. The cavities that the pipes run through are small enough that a reticulated system would be hard to retrofit. The suggested (tongue-in-cheek) solution was to “wait until you hear your neighbour showering before you have your shower.” Haha - thanks.
I've lived in buildings with this, and others (houses) without, and I much prefer the former. There's nothing I need to maintain, and the 'big' version seems to be more reliable than the single-house-sized heating equipment. The one time I remember the hot water being repaired, the janitor stuck up a note explaining that due to some sort of redundancy we'd still have hot water, but it would be less hot than it was supposed to be.