All Forum Posts by: Steven Westlake

More clarity-The tenants were all informed of the flush, albeit not with 24 hrs notice. More likely the maintenance man knocked on the door and said your hot will be less than hot for about the next hour while were flushing water heaters out, cold water will not be effected.

 We leave to cold fill running into the tank and open the bottom valve until clean water comes out. Shut the valve and move garden hose to next tank, repeat.

 Fyi, this issue with the water heater that started all this appears to be caused by someone disconnecting wires inside the fused disconnect and wire nuting the hot wires together by-passing the fuses. Also no copper extensions out of any of the other water heaters, and no flex connections, it is all hard plumbed with cpvc. Sadly One of the tenants remembers my father doing the hard cpvc plumbing, I inherited this about 2 years ago.

Robert Ruschak - please see above, water heaters NOT inside apartments.

24 hours notice-this my fault, i did not clarify, the water heaters are not located inside each apartment, they located along side the building in an room accessible from the outside.

 This rooms contains other items such as electric and water meters, etc. we keep other items such as mower in there.

OK, so I’m having some personality conflict between one of my tenants and the maintenance man. The maintenance man is also a tenant, but in a different building in a different town. These 2 buildings are approximately 12 miles apart.

I’m open to suggestions for your help.

My maintenance guy is the son of one of my tenants. his mother lives upstairs from the tenant whom the conflict has occurred with. His mother may have been dating this tenant. Drinking may have been involved on either side or both sides.

the maintenance guy does visit his mother there pretty regularly, and tends to combine these two tasks into a single trip.

He went there to flush water heaters, and repair another water heater. The repair was a different tenant than his mother or conflict guy. So i said might as well flush all the water heaters while your there. Thats seems to have been where it started, conflict guy did not want his water heater flushed, so he called me, I explained that it cleaned out the sediment and allowed his water heater to work better and last longer. So he agreed to get his flushed, pretty certain he has no say in the maintenance of my building, but it seemed easier to explain why, than to draw a line in the sand.

Was this fight my fault? I’m horrible at reading people, 35 plus years in engineering and computer programming, leaves me always going directly to logic and reasoning without emotion.

Norm Kopesky - I love Menards, sadley it’s only for my Ohio properties, none in Houston Texas.

Alan DeRossett-5/8 drywall will take more of a beating. Also more sound deadening and better fire rating. 
And you could aways double it, or back with plywood. Had some tenants sharing a wall and complaining about each others noise. I go to look and there were holes in the shared wall, which of course no one did. I said i can dampen some of the noise. One layer of 3/4 plywood, followed by a layer of 5/8 dry, then a spray textured layer of drywall mud and paint.  The complaints stopped. I assumed it really worked great. A week later i see one of them has a cast on their wrist. So i suppose it really did work, just not how i planned.

Daniel Smyth - premark, good idea

@Norm Kopesky - thanks, ish makes sense, should have figured as much.

@Norm Kopesky - thanks, great idea on tub building.

I do have a question though , in Houston iah is bush airport, I’m assuming that’s not what you meant?