Being a landlord is challenging. Being a landlord in winter is even more challenging. Like my former life as a Boy Scout, I thought I was prepared for winter. However, two things happened over the last three weeks that highlighted I’m not as prepared as I thought.
Issue 1:
During Christmas break I got a frantic call from a tenant saying she had water all over the floor in her living room and down into her hall.
I rushed over and noticed that the copper pipe in her hot water baseboard had burst and was spewing hot water all over her apartment. I sprinted to the mechanical room and just shut the whole heating system off. This gave me time to figure out what was going on. On my way back to her apartment I made a frantic call to my wife, “Bring ALL of our towels to Unit #8.” She didn’t know what to make of the call, but she showed up with totes of towels in about 5 minutes. We sopped up all the water and got the rebuild work underway. All we had to do in this case was dry out the subfloor and replace the laminate flooring.
Item 2:
Last week we had another ice/wind/snow storm that caused massive power outages across the province, 90,000+ people without power. This included an older unoccupied house of mine. When I went over to check on this house, it had been without power for 24 hours and the power company was expecting power to only be restored in another 24 hours. It had only been 24 hours and the interior temperature of the house was already 8 C, we weren’t going to make it another 24 hours without frozen pipes and water damage. This house has a oil furnace, however without power the furnace and blower won’t run. I scrounged a generator and roped our electricians into helping me out – we tried to backfeed the panel and get the furnace running, it didn’t work. The furnance just wouldn’t start.
At 5:00 pm, I left three small heaters running off the generator, all the taps on at a trickle and plumbing anti-freeze in the toilets. I was resigned to weeks of fixing water damage and not renting the house for February 1st. However, someone was smiling on me and at 6:00 pm the power came back on. At 8:30 I had the furnace running again.
Key Take Aways
My take away from these two experiences is
1) I got lucky.
There wasn’t that much water damage in the first apartment, and the power came back on in time in the house.
Our tenant was able to call our emergency line quickly and easily.
3) I need a plan for when this happens again
I had no real plans in place to deal with these emergencies, I just started scrambling when they happened. I need to create plan in advance to know what to do to handle extreme winter temperatures and power outages. Creating this plan is now on my project list.
Has anyone else created a plan like this before? Let us know in the comments what it includes.