"If you find the hot water's gone and it's going to be that way for a month, you know that summer has come," quipped Lyubov Lysenko, a 31-year-old teacher of literature in the former imperial capital Saint Petersburg.

Hundreds of thousands of city residents find every summer that running hot water is suddenly no longer an option.

This is as true when, as this year, the summery weather does not get going until June is out as in the years when the heat lies over the land for months at a stretch.

Saint Petersburgers who live in more privileged areas of the city know that summer has truly arrived when they are besieged by friends and relatives calling by on the off-chance of a hot bath.

Their response is likely to be generous, as a district spared in July may well find itself cut off in August.

The inhabitants of the ramshackle communal flats in the city's historic centre are more fortunate than most over the summer month: the Soviet-era flats are equipped with water-heaters that put them at an advantage compared with others who have to heat up pans of water on the gas-fire or flee to friends' flats.

Lysenko refuses to pay out the 2,000 rubles (67 dollars) an individual water-heater would cost.

"I can't afford so much money for something I'd only be using once a month," she said as she filled four large pans of water that should would heat, as the need arose, over the gas.

"I have to go through this rigmarole twice a day, but we get by," she said.

Andrei Burtsev, manager of a high-street appliances store, noted however that he did good business for water-heaters in the summer months.

"The hot-water shortages might be a nuisance to others but they're a boon to me," he said.

Tatyana Volovich, a 40-year-old engineer, was furious with the local authorities.

"The lack of hot water in the summer is bad enough, but what is downright scandalous is that they continue to charge us the full rate when they send us the utilities bill.

"The 60 rubles (two dollars) isn't a fortune, but all the same, why should we have to pay for something we don't get?," she fumed.

Under local law, the annual checks of the city's water piping system, designed in principle to avert supply cut-outs during the winter, cannot extend longer than 21 days.

However "most of the city's piping was installed 20 years ago and needs to be replaced, so the annual inspection process takes a lot longer, often more than is allowed," Galina Sorokina of Lenenergo, the local power supplier, explained.

"Annual cuts in the supply of hot water are unfortunately necessary during the maintenance period to ensure the proper functioning of the city's heating system," a local official said, a theme that is echoed in a majority of Russian cities from Vladivostok in the Far East to Kaliningrad on the Baltic.

But Saint Petersburg's five million residents are not convinced.

"For our city services it's as if winter always comes out of the blue and then our heating pipes break down," Volovich complained.

TERRA.WIRE