Seeking Advice on how to Tactfully talk to LL about Heat
Background: We moved into an owner-occupied top floor of brownstone over the summer. Before lease signing, we made absolute sure to ask specifically about their attitude towards winter heating protocol and they assured us that there would be “enough” to keep us warm. (FWIW We are coming from large apt buildings that were heated all day, every day for the entire duration of heating season and we made it crystal clear to the LL prior to lease signing that we are used to 68 degrees). Now we are a month into heating season with a little cold snap last week and LL is proving to be extremely stingy (and rather defensive when approached casually) with not providing the minimum indoor temperature required by NY heating law (I have thermometers monitoring every room, thank you). The last conversation we had, I got excuses ranging from: you aren’t even home during the day (but we very well could be!?) , it’s too expensive (cost of doing business!?), it’s wasteful (but it’s the law!?), my thermostat’s broken (so fix it), just wear a sweater and heavy socks like we do and you’ll be fine (already am and I’m not fine). Also I mentioned that my spouse will likely be working from home starting December (TRUE!), will therefore need daytime heat, and they freaked out with 20 questions as to why (none of your business). Trying to get this sorted as amicably as possible before it actually gets COLD out and we are left with documenting temperatures and calling 311, especially since we share a stoop and hallway with them. Who has advice on how to continue the discussion in a firm but friendly manner? THANK YOU.
CTG
in Landlord 10 years and 6 months ago
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39 replies
BobMarvin | 9 years and 2 months ago
Reading this thread makes med SO happy I’m not a landlord. Thank goodness for the Lefferts Manor single-family covenants!
sarahbrooklyn | 9 years and 2 months ago
I was a landlord in a two family. We lived on the bottom and our top tenants were colder. If I set my thermostat at 72 then they had 68-70 temp. I was a major pain when I had a tenant that worked from home all day as we had the steam heat off during the day prior to this tenant. I would be upset when he complained in shorts and a tshirt or I found the window open when the heat was on. With steam heat it is uneven and hot when on, but don’t open the windows! The heat shuts off and everything stays warm. I did have to install a thermostat so they couldn’t complain that it was warmer than 68.
I’d get an electric heater for the room and lower your expectations a bit. But you should have at least 68 degrees. Invite them up again or take a picture of the thermostat. Pictures are more effective by far.
Also on a funny note, we moved to a three family and I insisted we set it up so each tenant pays and controls their own heat. They keep it FREEZING up there!!! It is funny when you have to pay for it, you suddenly become a polar bear.
sew536 | 9 years and 2 months ago
well its definitely too late for tact but you have some points so do they. First be aware in owner occupied houses you dont have the rights of rent stabilized apt buildings so keep in mind ultimately he can decide youre not ideal tenants for his house and not renew. That said he probably want a decent tenant that pays regular rent and no gap finding a new one. If you were really that clear about your priorities good but odd you forsaw it i wonder is this a common issue with owner landlords i could see how as im about to become one. Firs you have to understand its likely costing him at least $500 a month already just for gas let alone maintenance of system. youre right its a cost of business and he may decide to raise rent to cover it. also its not easy to get these old houses to hold heat they and their systems are not built like apts, also its completely common in any building to have the thermostats set for certain hours to be warmer than others so its a little unreasonable to demand max heat 24/7 ,also these systems usually have only one thermostst and likely not i n your apt where you can mess with it so it may be in fact is very likely that the building has different temps in different areas and perhaps yours is cooler the solution is then to add a radiator not overheat the entire house to get your cool spot up to temp.so i would try to keep tempers down and work with him to solve problem not be sure hes just cheap.
sew536 | 9 years and 2 months ago
well its definitely too late for tact but you have some points so do they. First be aware in owner occupied houses you dont have the rights of rent stabilized apt buildings so keep in mind ultimately he can decide youre not ideal tenants for his house and not renew. That said he probably want a decent tenant that pays regular rent and no gap finding a new one. If you were really that clear about your priorities good but odd you forsaw it i wonder is this a common issue with owner landlords i could see how as im about to become one. Firs you have to understand its likely costing him at least $500 a month already just for gas let alone maintenance of system. youre right its a cost of business and he may decide to raise rent to cover it. also its not easy to get these old houses to hold heat they and their systems are not built like apts, also its completely common in any building to have the thermostats set for certain hours to be warmer than others so its a little unreasonable to demand max heat 24/7 ,also these systems usually have only one thermostst and likely not i n your apt where you can mess with it so it may be in fact is very likely that the building has different temps in different areas and perhaps yours is cooler the solution is then to add a radiator not overheat the entire house to get your cool spot up to temp.so i would try to keep tempers down and work with him to solve problem not be sure hes just cheap.
bconstant | 10 years and 6 months ago
CTG, you’re right that this last weekend was a bit rough. But you seem to be deliberately ignoring the overall message from the brownstone owners in this thread: old heating systems are uneven and imprecise. Not only are you not being patient enough to discover whether this is truly an ongoing problem (or if the disagreement is just where the border of warm/cool is), but you don’t seem to acknowledge that your landlord likely CAN’T provide you with the exacting kind of conditions you want. Old buildings require people to be a little forgiving. They aren’t hermetically sealed, they don’t have point-heat sources, and they can’t adequately be monitored for things like temperature in the way a new construction/renovation could. As for stapling things into his woodwork – do this at your own peril. At this point you are ready to start doing childish revenge things just to get back at him. You need to understand that you are at least as bad as your landlord, if he is indeed as curmudgeonly as you say he is.
CTG | 10 years and 6 months ago
An update on our situation to all you tough critics: our landlord STILL has not provided adequate heat despite how cold, windy and miserable it was all weekend. Our max temp was 62 degrees and SO SO DRAFTY. I told landlords, either you turn up the heat or we staple plastic window sheeting into your beautifully restored woodwork and start deducting rent. (We signed an agreement preventing us from adding curtain rods etc to their window frames because they really ARE pristine and we appreciate original detail). Regarding moving, based off this unpleasant experience alone, we are highly considering it now. Did I mention that they became **belligerent** last week upon discovering an open window in our kitchen while the heat was on? (We were just trying to ventilate some cooking odor!)
BenGazi | 10 years and 6 months ago
Move.
NeoGrec | 10 years and 6 months ago
CTG, While personally I hate an excessively heated home, I appreciate that you’ve been quite clear you want to be warm enough to hang out in your underwear. The tone of some of these posts is a bit snippy. But that’s because all these home-owners know it’s just NOT going to happen. You’ll never be comfortable, even if the LL turns up the heat. So, renting this apt was a mistake. Now you need to move on – literally. Go find yourself a multi-unit apartment building (preferably pre-war) with heat belching out all day and night.
Augustiner | 10 years and 6 months ago
Some tenants like to put the AC to 65 degrees in summer and the heat to 80 degrees in winter. It’s absurd. On another note: heating systems that can’t be regulated per floor or outlet should be illegal at this point.
concord | 10 years and 6 months ago
The solution to these ‘dilemmas’ is to have a separate boiler per floor (for brownstones). This way tenant pays gas bill etc, and each one is ‘happy’ – or pay the bill. Expensive in the initial capital investment but cheaper in long run – specially aggravation! Or you deal with hot-cold co-op/condo members…happy winter!
Rick | 10 years and 6 months ago
“This old house” living is not for everyone. Many of us are still using antique heating systems. These old systems, like steam heat do not work like a toaster. They are far from perfect but work fine for many of us.
eman134 | 10 years and 6 months ago
you seem like tenants from hell
slopefarm | 10 years and 6 months ago
It’s not BS, CTG. Re-read bored at work’s “Take two” from yesterday. You are not entitled to indoor daytime temps of 68 unless it is below 55 outside and you are not entitled to nighttime indoor temps above 55 unless it is below 40 outside. Almost any landlord in an owner-occupied house will give you substantially better than code, but that’s all that code requires. You may be right that your landlord is going to be stingy with the heat, you just don’t know yet. It is too early and it is too warm out for that to have been tested, for all the reasons people have posted above. Wait a few weeks — when it gets consistently colder out, that boiler will be on regularly and I doubt your stingy, cagey, noncommunicative landlord will keep things below code or even close to minimum. http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/tenants/heat-and-hot-water.shtml As for your landlord’s supposed oral agreement to keep the apartment sufficiently toasty or “underwear warm” for you, it is worth the paper it is printed on. But you are again better off dealing with this once lower temperatures result in consistent heat and you see what the real pattern is. Presumably in december it will be consistently under 55 outside during the day and you will be entitled to 68 inside all day. But not now.
brokelin | 10 years and 6 months ago
Having lived in brownstone rentals, often on the top floor, and owned a coop in one, that one not on the top floor, here’s my take. However much your landlord wanted to provide you with more heat (I get that he doesn’t seem inclined to, but even if he did), it won’t happen. I’ve rented many top floor units where the back half of the top floor never even got adequately warm in the winter – indeed, the back room would be noticeably way colder than the front of the apartment. This had to do with the old heating system or furnace, and that room being furthest from the furnace. The heat just didn’t make it there. This was also true when I bought a coop. We intended to heat the entire place, but there was no way to get the top (fourth) floor warm enough without totally freaking out the first floor unit with too much heat. We came up with a thermostat setting to compromise, but I think the top floor still would have wanted more heat, and the first floor wanted less. (The thermostat was in the unit on the second floor.) It is also possible that there are skylights at the top that are specifically designed to let heat out. Many of those old high hat skylights over top floors actually have vented sides for this purpose. The top floor of our coop had such a vented skylight – it was originally over an old airshaft in the center of the building, which had since been incorporated into the apartment. Once we replaced this very old skylight with one that wast not vented, the top floor was warmer. I had two rentals with skylights in the bathrooms. One was one of those old high hats that was over what was now a shower – it must have been vented because it was windy and freezing in that shower. The other was an original, gorgeous stained glass window in the bathroom ceiling, which had been openable originally to vent the bathroom, and even though it was now fixed in place, the old glass let in so much cold air. Stained glass panels above the replaced windows can also let in a lot of cold air. I knew someone who lined them with glass or plexiglass fixed storms to prevent the heat transfer there. Old skylights in the hallway over the stairs can also cause heat loss to the upper floors. It is also likely that you lose heat on the top floor from a non-insulated space between the ceiling and roof. Then there’s the window issue. Yes, I’ve lived in places with recently replaced nice aluminum windows, even ones with storms, and yet the cold draft still comes in. This is due to two reasons – the window surfaces in brownstone windows are large, and a lot of heat is lost through them. And because while the windows were replaced, the front and back of the building were built with no insulation around the windows and usually none was ever added. So there’s cold coming through the walls there, too. Put your hand on the wall below or next to the window in the winter and you will see what I mean. You can help some by adding window treatments to prevent heat transfer through the windows. And perhaps curtaining off large sections of the whole wall will help with drafts from the wall parts. Lined curtains plus cellular blinds that prevent heat transfer are your best bet. Yes, both of these are quite expensive when purchasing for big windows that shades have to be custom cut to fit and curtains have to be sourced in extra long lengths. Other than that, your best bet is to get a few high quality space heaters, not the ones with electrical coils that set things on fire. You will be more comfortable. You can ask your landlord for more heat, but you likely won’t get it, even if it were possible to make your apartment comfortable without the lower levels living with windows open in the winter, which it very likely isn’t even possible anyway with the heating system, even if the lower levels were happy to live with too much heat and open windows. Yes, it sucks, but that is one of the many things that go with brownstone living. It really amazes me that homeowners don’t insulate the front and back walls of these homes, as it would likely help a lot with heating bills. I love brownstones, but once I bought a place in one and realized it wasn’t just landlord frugality that made them hard to heat, I’m not sure I’d live in one again, unless I had the money to buy the whole house and massively insulate and replace the old heating system with new radiant heat that actually works better. I think of this, because having finally moved to a large, overheated building, when I sweat at night, even with the window open as it is now – I’m not cold anymore, which is nice, but too much heat is still annoying, especially at night.
CTG | 10 years and 6 months ago
Considering the amount of money we are paying for this BS, Kansas is indeed looking better and better every day….
boredatwork | 10 years and 6 months ago
You can be as “particular” as you want, and may have even discussed what kind of underwear you want to wear, but you signed a lease which doesnt seem to include any requirment to provide heat above what the law requires. Get a grip and get ready to find another place where you pay for your own heat and can set it to whatever you want.
ventilated | 10 years and 6 months ago
While I was sympathetic to your original post, CTG, you’ve definitely lost my sympathy. Newsflash: You’re not in Kansas anymore. Your landlord is not your super, nor your nursemaid. NO landlord is required to keep you comfortable in your underwear, and I can hardly believe you made this level of undress “crystal clear” to your LL when you discussed heat before lease signing. Life in an old building is quirky–probably not something you fully appreciate, tolerate or enjoy. We DO discuss heating preferences with prospective tenants before lease signing, even though we provide more than adequate (and more than legally-required) heat, both daytime and overnight. We are conscious that our tenants with small children and babies need more warmth than we ourselves prefer, and we provide that. We’ve paid good money to good plumbers to add vents to the pipe carrying steam to the extension, relocate the building thermostat and rebalance radiators to optimize steam reaching the furthest locations or rooms with the most heat loss. But provide comfortable-walking-around-in-underwear-heat? No.
cate | 10 years and 6 months ago
What Rick and Slopefarm said. You don’t understand how boilers work. It’s impossible to reach any accurate conclusion about the heat or your landlords at this point in the season.
slopefarm | 10 years and 6 months ago
We have a 2-fam house with a 1 zone old steam heat single pipe system. We are usually fairly indulgent of our tenants’ heating preferences, because we are charging, um, Park Slope rents, and we have liked our tenants and like to keep them happy, even when it means keeping the house a little hotter than we like. So I am not a cheapskate landlord (at least not about heat), and not inclined to just tell people to put on a hoodie and ski socks and tough it out. That said, the beginning of heat season is wonky, like a lot of people have said. When it is this warm out, it is both difficult and crazy to keep the boiler cranking 24/7\. The house is probably not getting cold enough to trigger the thermostat to signal for heat. You really need to wait until the outside temp drops for a while to see what the real deal is. And if it was THAT important to you, you should have stayed in a big building or negotiated for specific temperature requirements in the lease. But in the first instance, I say relax, and wait a few weeks to see what happens when it is actually cold out. Another thing you could do is look for heat loss. Are the exterior walls cold to the touch? Drafts along floors or window frames? Electrical outlets? Are there skylights? If the apartment is losing heat fast, some weatherproofing would help you AND your landlord.