Winter Preparation Plan

[Andrew Cameron]

I live in Nova Scotia, Canada and it's been a tough winter already.  I thought I was ready for the winter.  I had all of our snow equipment serviced, our bags of salt were all stacked nicely, and snow shovelers were lined up.  I thought I was all ready.  

Well it turns out that I wasn't.  Two things happened, I had a tenant leave a window open and one of her hot water baseboard pipes burst.  Second, we had a 24 hour power outage in one of our older unoccupied houses and I thought all the pipes were going to freeze.

I realized I need to make a plan for dealing with burst pipes, and for dealing with longer power outages, both for managing tenants and managing buildings.  Has anyone else created a document or plan like this before?  Any thoughts, comments, or starting points?

[Jeremy Zwicker]

You could add a section to your lease stating that any damage due to tenants leaving any windows open will be charged to the tenant and that you would be allowed to hold their damage deposit for it. I'm aware that this will not fix your problem, but it may deter tenants from leaving windows open and could help you from losing as much money if the tenant decides to come good for it.

You could also rent propane heaters with a pilot light or a battery starter when you have a vacant unit under construction in winter. You could set it to a temperature below what the rest of the house is at so it wouldn't run in theory unless the main heating system couldn't turn on. I don't know what the availability of them would be or if they would be economical to rent/buy.

On another note, I checked out your website from the link at the bottom of your post. It looks like a good website and I decided to bookmark it. It's always nice getting information from people who are local to my area (I live in Truro). If you are ever in Truro then I would like to have a coffee with you sometime.