r/SlumlordsCanada

Who wants to share a bedroom with this random dude for 500 bucks a month? Act now, first come first served!!

There is one cupboard and 1.5 steps up to the fridge🥴 ✨incredibly functional✨

Normally, I wouldn’t put my landlord in the slumlord category. My unit is actually very nice. The rent is actually below market value, and even though the rest of the building is a little bit rickety and rundown, it’s kept very clean and repairs are done pretty quickly. But here is the slumlord part: she is trying to get me to pay $6,000 for damages that were caused by two latent defects in the building.

So, a little background.

All the hot water pipes that heat the 10 units in the building run under my kitchen. Because of that, the interior temperature of my apartment is in the high 20s to the low 30s and actually gets hotter the colder it gets outside. It has gone up as high as 34°C. Because of that, I have to vent out the extra heat. Temperatures that hot are actually dangerous.

So the solution has been for me to vent out the extra heat by opening windows for short periods of time and then, at night, using an air conditioner that pumps out the extra heat through a winterized insert. And the reason why I’m so careful about how I vent out the extra heat is that I understand the concept of temperature creep. Even though the heat coming from the floor makes it impossible for the apartment to ever get below zero, a constant draft could cause the wall itself to reach below zero temperatures. I don’t sleep with the windows open when it is below zero and the air-conditioning insert is winterized to make sure no cold drafts come in, only hot air pushed out.

The other reason why I’m cautious is that under my bedroom window and under my living room window is where the radiators are and there is no warm water running through them. The high temperature makes it impossible for the thermostat to kick in, so they’re basically cold pipes up against an exterior wall.

I should also add that my windows are not allowed to be open during my night shift because I work for a financial institution.

So, on January 1, the radiator in my living room split due to an ice jam/ice plug.

My landlord is trying to use the fact that I have to open my windows to claim that I am the reason why an ice plug formed.

The reality is that there was actually a section of pipe directly under my living room radiator that was above uninsulated cinderblock, sealed behind the laundry room ceiling, with the piping in contact with the outside wall, with only a thin piece of wood between it and the brick. And because there was no running water in that pipe, because the radiators don’t ever turn on, it froze.

Now, I don’t believe she truly believes I was the cause because she did not submit an eviction request due to me being negligent, and she didn’t submit a request for damages to the New Brunswick Landlord and Tenant Relations Office. But she did serve me with an invoice for $9,000, and she did try to renovict me by claiming that my apartment needed massive amounts of work. She lost that judgment, and somehow, miraculously, no repairs were actually required in my apartment at all, and I got a new invoice of $6,000 instead.

Now, I would have no problem paying this if I felt I was actually responsible, and I could even acknowledge that maybe there could be a small chance that I could be partly responsible. So I didn’t refuse to pay. I went back to her and asked for the report on how she came to the conclusion that I was responsible. In that report, I asked her if the plumber inspected my air-conditioning unit, and did the plumber take laser temperature readings of the uninsulated piping section before they covered it with spray foam and insulation?

I want to make sure that if we are going to court, she has the correct information in that report and isn’t going to try and claim that my living room window was open, which it wasn’t, and I can prove that.

My living room window was open for two 15-minute breaks and one lunch break. It was not opened after that. I did open my bathroom window for about an hour between 11 PM and 12 AM, which got the temperature down low enough for me to be able to relax and watch a bit of television. The air-conditioning unit was only turned on at 5 AM because it had gotten too uncomfortable to sleep at that point, and the leak was discovered at 9 AM. So the leak occurred somewhere between 5 AM and 9 AM. So even if my air-conditioning unit wasn’t properly installed and somehow a draft came through it, that still isn’t even enough time to create a cold pocket, and it’s also 14 feet from where the pipe split, in a different room.

So, is anyone familiar with New Brunswick landlord and tenant rules? Am I entitled to that report? Am I entitled to have her exhaust all other possibilities? Am I entitled to have her present those possibilities to her insurance? Basically, she’s arguing that correlation is causation.

In any case, if I decide to settle out of court, or if we do go to court, I’m confident she’s not going to win the whole $6,000 anyway. She created the condition where the pipes were at risk of having no warm water going through them, and she’s responsible for the conditions that require hot air to be vented out of the apartment. So whether the cause was due to the uninsulated pipe, or if somehow my insert failed, she has some partial responsibility either way.

Sorry for the word salad

The pictures include a record of how hot it gets in my apartment. Proof that the insert for the air conditioner actually has a higher R value than the window with a photograph of a laser reading of the window and a laser reading of the insert. A picture of the hot water piping that runs under my kitchen, an exterior picture of the air conditioner insert and finally a picture of the section of piping that was not insulated at all that was buried under the ceiling above the cinderblock with no insulation right up against the outside wall.