Flooding

As if on cue, the pipes several floors up have exploded once again. My girlfriend's apartment was waterlogged this morning, so she came down and cooked breakfast on my stove. She moves out next week.

Temperature Regulation

I've always dimly registered that it was a problem, but I'm starting to come fully to terms with just how big a deal it is to have proper temperature regulation in an apartment. Every spring and fall, when the temperature falls and rises chaotically, there's a few months where my sleep suffers. These apartments have only wall mounted units (and we're not supposed to run the electric heat if we can avoid it), so there's not a huge amount of temperature regulation available.

Most of the other places I've lived had solid central heat/cooling. I'm starting to long for that again.

Blackout

We had another set of power failures last night due to the cold weather. The building isn't very well insulated, and on really cold/windy nights the hot water heat simply can't keep up. To keep from freezing, people turn on the electric heaters in the window A/C units.

The problem is that the building was not wired for electric heat. So everyone turns on their A/C heaters, the transformer in the hallway overheats, and the breaker for the floor trips. After half an hour or so, the transformer has cooled off and they can reset the breaker.

This really wouldn't bother me a whole lot but for two things: 1) Rebooting my computers sucks - a lot. And 2) I never use the electric heat because I actually took the time to insulate my apartment, so I'm being unfairly penalized by those who do.

Really though, what needs to happen is to redo all the windows and A/C unit junctions so they don't leak cold air. Ideally, I'd like:

- all double pane windows
- fix the seals on the sliding doors (and fix the sliding doors)
- change the window separators from solid, thermally conductive aluminum to something that at least stands a chance of being insulated
- reseal and/or rework the A/C units so that they don't bleed cold air into the apartment

Honestly though, they probably won't bother even fixing up these apartments, as we're on the lower floors and there's less money involved. Basically, the rabble live down here where I live, and I gather there's not much incentive for them to improve things.

Update

I suppose it's time for an update.

We finally have new laundry machines. At least they are reliable, which is a plus.

There was some major snafu upstairs in the management side. We had a couple of staffing changes, and apparently no-one bothered to renew my lease. There was a paniced 'please renew' a few days ago; I compared the new lease against the old and helped them fix a bunch of the typos and missing sections in it.

They finally turned on the building heat, to discover that my girlfriend's apartment had a major pipe break in it (the building is hot water heated.) I've had three days of wet stinky carpet as a result, but it's finally starting to dry out now.

If it wasn't so cheap (I'm on grandfathered rent) and such a pain in the ass to move, I'd be living somewhere else. The only thing that keeps me here is inertia.

That's about it.

Laundry

The laundry room has sunk to new lows in terms of available machines. There's 9 washers, but only about four of them seem to be functional at any given time. Most of those are obviously damaged in some way.

In some ways it seems like we're making progress, but in others not so much.

Vacation

I've been out and away from blogging for a while, and a lot has happened in that time.

For starters, I had a meeting with the building manager shortly after my previous post. She's a nice lady, very personable and charming. I'm sure she's well trained in how to convey positive impressions, but even so, I got the feeling she's up to her ears in stupidity when it comes to building maintenance.

She actually had my laundry list of issues in one of those stand-up wire paper holders when I got there. It looked well used and had been highlighted and scribbled on extensively. We went over most of the stuff on it and she talked about the plans and progress on each.

The real problem though is that the building needs money to be renovated, but it needs renters for money, and needs renovation for renters. This is one place where I could see raw capital investment making a big difference.

Since then, various other problems have arisen with the building, but other issues have largely been fixed:

- the heat finally appears to be under control. Except for the coldest days, the heaters are finally cranking out enough heat to keep my apartment warm, though this is with massive cold barriers still in place.

- I had a massive kitchen sink drain and overflow issue, where the pipes draining my kitchen got completely fouled up for a couple of days. I didn't lose anything important, but the cleanup sucked. The maintenance staff did a good job, but even they were near wits end with it. I know how bad plumbing can be; I don't envy what they had to go through to clear the system.

- the elevators have been working properly for the last two weeks. The elevator company replaced the cabling for one of them, but there's still some mechanical weirdness that crops up from time to time. My girlfriend got stuck in one for 20 minutes until maintenance could drop down from above and manually force the door open.

- the laundry room is still hosed up, with a couple of washers having been dead for the last month or longer. The laundry room flooding issue appears to have been resolved for the moment.

There's still a long uphill battle ahead, but there seems to be forward progress. The worst part of it is going to be regaining the faith of the inhabitants; quite frankly, attitudes about the building are not positive.

I think the worst part for me is that I don't see an easy way out of it for the building owners - they're going to have to spend money, and that's all there is to it. I'd personally recommend that they begin renovating one empty apartment per month on the upper floors. Install double pane glass and rework the outer walls, and redo the kitchen and bathroom.

Granted, it will be expensive, but this adds one very rentable apartment per month. These upgraded apartments will also have about half the heating bill of the others. The only problem with this is that I'd guess the payback time to be 2-3 years if you could keep the apartment full; in short, it requires forward investment. There's also the risk that you couldn't keep the apartment full due to things like hot water failures.

I guess we'll have to see.

Plumbing Redux

Today has not been a good plumbing day. I've narrowly averted disastrous overflows several times using either the bucket or garbage disposal method; there's no point in calling the maintenance guy, because it would just take him away from fixing the actual problem, and he'd just do the same thing I'd do anyway. I consider it my small sacrifice to help out.

I was not so lucky a few minutes ago, and I ended up with probably a gallon or so of stinky sludge water on pretty much everything in the kitchen. I've got it mostly mopped up and taken care of for the moment, but I'm pretty sick of it. So, being the MacGyver that I am, I have a temporary workaround.

I put the plug in the drain, stuck a tin can on top of it, and put a weight-lifting weight on top of it. The hole diameter is about 3 inches, and the weight is about 12.5 pounds, making for about 1.8 psi rejection, or about four feet of water column. This isn't a huge amount, but it should stop incidental seepage and should at least limit the impact when a surge hits.

I really hope this shit gets fixed soon.