We lost hot water in our apartment, Not sure how to proceed w/management

January 19, 2023 10:18 PM

Current Problem: On Saturday the hot water in our apartment suddenly turned tepid/luke warm and hasn’t returned to normal since. Maintenance's response to my repair request was not encouraging.

We've had issues with the place but none with the hot water — it was working normally until this weekend.

I submitted a maintenance request Tuesday, Maintenance Guy's response was:

I have inspected all of the water heaters for your section and have not identified any issues. The property is divided into 3 sections each served by a group of water heaters. Those tanks combined hold 300 gallons of hot water per section. However, with 12 building and 60 apartments using hot water simultaneously the tanks may take some time to replenish. Please note that I cannot control the hot water usage of other tenants and again have inspected all of the heaters and found no issues.

Husband works from home, over the last few days we've been taking turns measuring (and yes, documenting) the temperature during the day. It's between 93-98 in the mornings with brief, unpredictable spikes to 104-109 around 11am and after. Temp hasn’t gotten anywhere near the recommended 120 needed to kill common tap water germs.

Marginally Relevant Background Info:

The complex was built in 1945, our apartment is a middle-unit townhouse with 2 main floors and a basement. Most of the structure is original with a few decades worth of hodgepodge add-ons and repairs. The owning company seems to do just enough to maintain minimum legal standards and surfacy curb/photo appeal — but not much more. Rent is market-rate and average for the size, location, amenities etc.

We moved in 3.5 months ago and have been pretty frustrated from the start. In the first 6 weeks we had 3 separate water leaks in our basement celling. Management and maintenance still don't know what caused them — they aren’t interested in figuring it out.

Maintenance Guy gave us a similar blow off. He told us not to worry about another leak because …Hey! Renters insurance covers water damage and the leaks "probably" aren’t a problem unless they're a continuous stream or flood. We emailed the manager a few times asking for more investigation, outlined our concerns that problems like this don’t just magically disappear, they usually get worse and more expensive. She didn’t respond.

Based on all of this I’m not at all optimistic management will do anything about the hot water issue unless they absolutely have to.


Questions:

Do they absolutely have to? Do we have any standing to press this as health/habitability issue?

YANML. We’re not opposed to consulting a lawyer, financially we need to do most of the legwork and preliminaries ourselves.

I know we need to start a paper trail of requests. What do we ask for? Is a simple please resolve this and restore our hot water to ____ degrees sufficient? Should we be more specific and ask for something like a hot water heater in the basement?

Oregon Administrative Rules and residential code say landlords are responsible for ensuring hot water. Is there a legal definition of “hot” that I can reference?

Is there any place in the OARS or code that can help us understand the rules for shared tanks in multifamily buildings?

Breaking the lease is an option. I’m fairly confident we can get out of the penalties. But jeesh...we just moved 3 months ago. It was harder and sucked more than all of our past moves combined. We'd like to avoid doing it again this year.

I’m familiar with the Community Alliance of Tenants. They're wonderful but the lines have been bogged down lately — I haven't been able to get through to anyone. I’ll keep at it but they’re busy trying to help alot of people who are facing eviction stay off the streets. This isn't that life shattering.

We're covered on suggestions for how to better compete with our neighbors for the tank water and stuff like: Get up earlier! Take a shower at night! Leave a nice note asking them to conserve etc.

We just want a fucking hot shower without having to re-arrange our daily lives, rally other residents or plot elaborate timing strategies.

Thank You

posted by space_cookie to Law & Government (10 answers total)

This probably won't help that much but the next thing I would do would be to measure the hot water temperature late at night when presumably no one else is using it. Measure it when you turn it on, let it run for 10 minutes, measure it again. If it is warmer but not hot, do another 10 minutes. Idea is that he can't say it still replenishing but it is late enough it should be already replenished. Can't say "just let a run a bit" because you did that too. So it is clear that the hot water tanks are not getting the water hot enough.

If in fact, the problem really is that there is hot water but not enough to go around, that is going to be a harder problem. No bright ideas there.
posted by metahawk at 10:46 PM on January 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Did your neighbors notice this change at the same time?

It’s possible your landlord turned down the temp on purpose (to save money?). But you might have a better chance of fighting it if you aren’t the only complaint.
posted by nat at 11:12 PM on January 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

IAMNYL: I am someone who has fought two different landlords on this sort of issue

Per OR Rev Stat § 90.360 (2021) Landlords in your jurisdiction must provide a habitable dwelling and must make requested repairs within seven days for essential services like hot water.

Your unit should have water hot enough to prevent something like a Legionaires outbreak, which is around 120F. The law isn't specific - so you can just state in plain English that it isn't "hot" enough for your needs or safety.

The law, OR Rev Stat § 90.365 (2021) permits several remedies. After giving written notice to the landlord specifying the breach you may seek substitute services, diminution in rent damages or substitute housing. Deducting rent for each day it is not habitable has been effective in getting results for me in the past.

If a follow up letter is required I would suggest contacting an actual lawyer - and then include that you are seeking legal representation in your letter noting the lack of resolution to their breach of contract with you. Talk to your neighbors - splitting the cost of a lawyer by five makes them a much more affordable option.

Listing your rights under the two laws in plain language in your letter will also feel great. For maximum officialness send it registered mail
posted by zenon at 11:25 PM on January 19, 2023 [10 favorites]

Where i live, we have a local tenants union that offers helpful online resources and legal advice.

Searching for "portland Oregon renter tenant union legal advice" finds:

* portland tenants united
* community alliance of tenants

the former site links to this renter's handbook on repairs (pdf) from oregonlawhelp.org

the handbook on repairs looks like it would be worth a thorough read.
posted by are-coral-made at 12:30 AM on January 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

Approaching this from a technical angle rather than a legal angle- Assuming Maintenance Guy is telling the truth- OK, so the temperature at the water heaters is normal. That doesn't mean that the temp at your faucet/taps is normal. Ask to have it checked at the heaters and at your apartment. Sometimes there are blend valves post-water-heater (these exist for a number of reasons... you can run the water heaters at an elevated temperature, say 150 deg to kill microorganisms and allow you to "stretch" the capacity of the tanks i.e. 300 gallons of "too hot" water can be turned into 400 gallons of "appropriately hot" water by diluting the too hot water with some cold water. The mixing valve will put a ceiling on the max output temp to prevent scalds.) If there are blend valves, they may be malfunctioning or mis set. There could also be a malfunctioning pressure differential valve somewhere that's causing a cross-connection between the hot and cold.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:14 AM on January 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Another technical issue is that one of your neighbors that you share hot water with has a leaky faucet. A steadily running faucet can blow through a ton of water, potentially enough to drop the average temperature a few degrees.

Someone may also have washed their hands on the way out the door going on vacation, and left the tap running or something.
posted by rockindata at 4:33 AM on January 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think it's fine to take suggestions about how to handle this in the immediate future and commenters above have good ideas, but I would start planning for a move again. If you can't handle the thought of it right this minute that's fine, but start to put aside resources even if you mentally shelve it for 6 months. This doesn't sound like a landlord/superintendent situation that will improve much with time.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:36 AM on January 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Move ASAP. Sorry. Smushing two terrible moves together gets the suck over sooner. Future You from a year from now will thank you for this sacrifice.
posted by shock muppet at 9:04 AM on January 20, 2023

Two possible technical issues:
1. The recirculating pump stopped working. This is the pump that keeps hot water circulating through the pipes between the units, so that people get roughly the same temperature water. Otherwise, the nearest unit gets scalded while the far units get chilled. This can explain how it happened so suddenly.
2. Pipe insulation. Same function but no the likely cause of a sudden change.

So, you could reply to the Maintenance Guy with this: "Have you checked the recirculating pump and can you add insulation to the pipes?"

Also talk to your neighbors and foment a rebellion. There's strength in numbers.
posted by dum spiro spero at 2:34 PM on January 20, 2023

Response by poster: Update: Had a rare flash of clarity this morning and thought Hmmm...maybe just ask the manager for an in-person meeting and act like we're all reasonable adults who are on the same side and want the same thing. It's Friday. Nothing's going happen over the weekend anyway so why not?

Husband and I talked it over, he liked the idea better than going all guns blazing and had already cherry-picked some of the advice here. We're happy to say that the combination might have actually worked.

We got what we needed: a non-bullshit explanation about what's going on & concrete information about what they're doing to resolve it. They've scheduled an inspection/line test for the shared pipes on Wednesday. We all agreed to meet again and talk compensation once we know how long repairs will take.

We did talk to the neighbors. That helped alot. They noticed the water temp change but hadn't submitted any maintenance requests. We were the first and only ones to complain. Maintenance/Manager therefore initially treated it like an isolated incident. They realized it was bigger problem once the neighbor's alerts came in.

dum spiro spero. You were close. The manger suspects a crack in the pipe that recirculates hot water through our section of the complex. She's been here for 12+ years, lives on-site and probably knows the property better than the people who built it. I'm going with her. Maintenance Guy is henceforth downgraded to Maintenance Kid.

xenon. Your post was super helpful even though we went in a different direction. I sometimes excessively hyperfocus on super granular, technical details that aren't very important. You helped me avoid hours of wasted time going down a ORS research bunny trail leading nowhere. Plan A: Warm Fuzzies, Resolve Amicably. Plan B: Guns Blazing. Plan A feels whole lot better with with your feedback on Plan B in our back pocket.


So Thanks Everyone. This is what I love about Metafilter.
posted by space_cookie at 11:15 PM on January 20, 2023 [6 favorites]