Re: Tenant keeps overloading circuits - Landlord Forum thread 358540

Re: Tenant keeps overloading circuits by Thriver on September 3, 2018 @12:56

I have tenants I found out were running two space heaters off of extension cords & blew breakers. They called claiming they had no lights on a Friday night ending up costing me $2800.00 for 2 circuits so they could run their TV & microwave, computer & blender without blowing a circuit. I feel I was taken advantage of by the tenants as well as the electrical company. What made matters worse is the tenant requested the electrician to crawl through the attic to fix the old doorbell he didn't do. The tenant can go buy a portable doorbell for $15.00 because they're very easy to install. The tenants are not admitting they had two space heaters running off extension cords though, the electrician revealed this to me. I had just had their wall heater repaired six months before this, so there was no need to be doing this.

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Re: Tenant keeps overloading circuits by Garry on September 3, 2018 @14:56	[ Reply ]

Who was in control that weekend-----you or your tenants? YOU should have been, but weren't. Instead you chose to call an electrician and pay the either time+1/2, or double time and just told them to "fix it". What YOU could have done, was wait till Sat. morning, meet an electrician there for 2 hours only, figure out what was wrong, take off the space heaters, and turn up the main heat source. Then make a plan for you and the electrician to come back the next week, on regular time, and "MAYBE" do further work, IF NEEDED. If the Ts said something about a doorbell, YOU could have went and bought the battery operated kind, and installed it yourself. Unless it was below 30 degrees out, your Ts would survive the weekend, or you could have put them up in a hotel room for 2-3 days at $100 per day,, which would have been a lot cheaper for you than the $200/hour you probably paid the electrician for his weekend work. You were taken advantage of, because YOU chose to turn your LL duties over to other people who only had their OWN interests in mind. Learn to become a "hands-on" LL, and you won't have that problem.