So you think that turning the heating on once a year and then off once a year is too much micro management?

How do you even like that game?


Your pop may be enough (10% unemployment is too much btw) but if you have heating issues your transportation and infrastructure aren't.

Really? I install the heating, the distributors, the pumps, set it to shut off at 15 degrees, set up a bus line or something similar, and then I never have to look at it again.

If that's too much for you, what do you do with trash, water, sewage, crime, etc.? I would say the game is too difficult for you, or you could turn all that off, but it's a bit unreasonable to demand something that works perfectly, especially since the problem is sitting in front of the PC.

Ah yes, personal attacks — the peak of great dialogue. Surprised no one’s told me to stick to Candy Crush yet. When exactly did this community become so toxic?

Well boo hoo.
None of it was a personal attack, just saying that your complaint makes me feel like this game just isn't your cup of tea.

It sounds like the problem is your control and delivery of workers to the heating plants rather than any fault inherent in the heating system, and if that is the case, you are going to have problems with other stuff in the game like keeping power plants online, keeping prisoners from escaping, and so on.

You can make staffing more reliable in a few ways:

• First off, don't try to replace the entirety of a building's workforce, but try to only deliver a portion of it at a time. This keeps the building functioning at all times instead of stopping and starting. Whatever the number of workers it calls for, try to deliver a third or fourth of them at a time.
  
  
• You can also give workers a second chance to fill a job slot with the help of a nearby station, where extra workers can wait a calendar day (~60 seconds on slow speed) before filling any empty jobs or teleporting home. Use the following Line for this:
  • Stop 1: Pickup station - Load workers
  • Stop 2: Drop off station - Unload workers (to go fill jobs)
  • Stop 3: Drop off station - Force off workers (to wait and try again to fill jobs)
  
  
• End stations are great for making lines more reliable. You can set them to fixed time gap mode and specify an interval (like 45 seconds) to make the supply of labor more constant. You can then also add more vehicles until they pile up in the end station, which gives them time to get repairs, and the end station can use them to cover for other vehicles returning late, like from snowy roads or traffic.

Originally posted by Lopar:

You nedd to bring there workers 24\7\365 even importing them, even when it's not cold

You can set shutdown temperature per plant (in the plants window)

Also if your citizens are well supplied with clothes and have staffed hospitals, you can dip into some level of cold without heating and not have a disaster. There is even research to inprove this too.
If you are facing catastrophic events from heating issues, its a drop that overfills the barrel. Sort out rest of the logistic chain, add redundancy and it stops being so bad. Also afaik its also possible to natural selection this problem too. It will never be enough to not run heating at all, but things like surviving siberian cold (-45 C) with less than required heating should be possible.

ps: Heating and snow related transport issues come hand in hand, try using trams. They can ignore snow when disconnected from road traffic.