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  1. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
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    Default Re: Who is Responsible for Utility Bills when There is an Issue with the Equipment

    ekinnyc;814935]thank you for the reply. for what its worth, i live in NYC, so i had no means of investigating the matter other than speaking to the tenant and requesting/advising them to have FPL to come check it out.
    by the logic of me being able to investigate and see something wrong, they should have also seen the problem.
    actually they did not have the authority or responsibility to do much investigating at all. As the landlord, that is squarely on your shoulders.

    FPL isn't going to do much of anything regarding a water heater. Their responsibility ends at the meter.

    as it was described to me by both the tenant and the FPL tech, the water was gushing, not trickling. the unit is the end unit, so if the water is gushing outside, this should have been seen by at least someone (ie grounds crew of the community?) - this wasnt an internal leak.
    well, then there was more than the thermostat that was a problem. PRV's are simple spring operated devices. They reset once the pressure drops below their limit so there would be a release of enough water to reduce the pressure after which it would close and there would be no water flow. If water was gushing, then the PRV also failed.

    but if water was gushing, why didn't anybody notice it and say something to somebody about the issue?

    are you referring to the thermostat reset switch that trips if the element gets too hot?
    it has nothing to do with the element getting too hot. It is a temp limit for the tank temperature. If the water tank gets too hot, it trips. I have never seen one that self resets although I suppose there could be such an animal out there. Generally you have to reset it. It tripping is an indicator of a problem so you would not want it to reset by itself.

    no mention of that by the tenant (either willful omission, or there wasnt a switch for them to reset/see). if it did trip, how could the heater keep going (i know this isnt an HVAC forum, just throwing out ideas)
    well, apparently it didn't trip so it wouldn't have to be reset in that case. I suppose there may not have been one but again, can't say I have seen one without the high temp klixon switch.

    .
    as it was described to me by both the tenant and the FPL tech, the water was gushing, not trickling.

    so, why was water gushing if the PRV was functioning? It wouldn't. It relieves pressure and once the pressure drops below the design pressure, it closes. If water was gushing, that means the valve was stuck and it is not likely they would even have hot water at that time since water would be continually flowing through the tank. It would not be able to provide hot water to the unit.

    what I suspect might have happened was:

    thermostat failed "on"; if present, the high temp limit switch also failed. Water over heated and PRV released pressure. I suspect that was kind of a continual thing until at some point the PRV failed open and allowed the gushing.

    what the tenant likely experienced;

    water was unusually hot and then, after the PRV failed, they had no hot water.

    given this went on for over a month, I don't think the PRV failed until near the discovery of the problem. If you have metered water, I would expect the bill to be high in the month the PRV failed, if it was open long enough to run a lot of water before it was discovered.



    the one thing I think you could have done is to have FPL give you regular updates to the power usage issue and if it continued to be excessive, then you should have mounted an investigation into the reason.

    so, unless you can firmly place some level of liability on the tenant due to a failure to see the obvious (if it was there), the excessive bill was caused by your defective water heater and they should not be liable for that.

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