acceptable time-frame for hvac repair? - Landlord Forum thread 222015

It is legal to wait until next Tuesday, but is a recharge going to fix it? It may be a relay or a bad compressor. Or a bad leak. Maybe that will take another week.

Talk to your tenants. Explain the situation, if they are reasonable tenants it should not be an issue. Bring over a fan if needed.

In our area it can be a life or death situation.

I also keep a 3500 watt generator on-site in case the power goes out. In a major emergency we could cool a downstairs unit (better insulated) and cram everyone in the building in there if necessary or until the city opened shelters.

I have a SFH remodeled into a duplex that 20 years ago and before nobody bothered with even window units. I recently added central air to make it easier to rent, but not as a habitablity thing.

I always think about what my great-grandmother used to say before she or anybody in the family had AC. "I prefer cold weather to hot. You can always put on enough clothes to stay warm. But you can only take off so much and you're still hot!" Proves that while you might be hot, it still habitable.

I guess it depends on the tenants (and the lease). If they're patient, they can wait until Tuesday. If, say, they have toddlers sensitive to lack of heat, they won't.

If you have a month-to-month and the tenants turn out to be "high maintenance", you can always bump up the rent to cover these costs. Conversely, you should have some sort of record or budget of how much you should spend for repairs et al., to see if the tenants are causing you to spend more money than you anticipated.

I think you are being more than reasonable. You do not need to kiss every tenants a$$. Especially if you are renting them a unit under market value. I rent all my units at or ABOVE market value, and I wouldn't even flinch at someone having to wait three days to have C/A repaired.

I would apologize to them though, just to be nice, not because you did anything wrong. It's not your fault the air broke. Houses break... it happens. They called you after business hours Fri for a non-emergency. The way I look at it, if you have it fixed by 5 pm Tuesday that was less than two days, as off-hours/weekends/holidays don't count for non-emergencies.

One of my tenants went from Thurs evening to Sun evening with only two small 110 space heaters in a 1000 sqft house in December. I believe it was high 30's outside. The 40-yr old furnace element went out and I couldn't get parts for it. They were just lucky I have a decent HVAC guy that picked up a new unit Sat AM and installed it on the weekend, otherwise she might have waited longer.