Sometimes you are too smart for your own good

Timco

Meter is the first thing I check on a tenant no heat call, or new tenant no heat call. "No one told me I had to call the gas company and open an account...the heat was on when I first looked through the place....."

T

JACK MARTIN

Sometimes you are too smart for your own good

I have been readingou the Wall and it has been very serious of late ( as it should be). I thought an incident that I had while still an apprentice would be good for a laugh. I was sent on a service call to one of the apartment buildings this contractor I was working for had on his call out list. The boiler would not fire and the building was getting cold. It is important to tell you that this apartment house was not in the good part of town. I arrived on the site and was presented with a hundred horse Wiel McLean sectional.The pilot was going: but trying to fire it caused the pilot to go out? SOOOOOO, in my limited experience I traced it ( I thought ) to the gas meter. I was sure the meter was not passing gas. I phoned the utlitie and expalined the problem and a service crew was sent out. I went back to the shop and not fifteen minutes had gone by that I recieved a call from Intercity gas. They asked had I put a lock on the meter valve in the back lane for some reason? I told him I was unaware of what he was talking about???? It seems that in the morning the caretaker had evcited a tenant that morning and it was not a pleasent event. The evictee had locked the valve off in a fit of revenge. they removed the lock turned the valve to open and low and behold the boiler worked quite well. Needless to say I was ribbed for some time about locks and unruly apartment dwellers. I have since made it a habit to check backlanes before I phone for help.




Jack Ennis Martin
Hug your kids and you will not have to be in court with them, Good Luck and carry bolt cutters.

bob young

lox

good story but to remove a n.y.c. lock you will need more than a set of bolt cutters. lol

Mellow_2

I think you did the right thing

It might seem that you should have found the lock and removed it to get the heat going. This would have fixed the problem but I always have to ask the reason for the lock? I know that in this case you found it was just the tenant, landlord spat but what if it was locked because of a hazard? They could have broken a pipe and turned it off..... when I need a pipe wrench to fill an oil tank I have to ask is the tank still on the other end of the pipe or did some one remove the tank and cap the pipe tight. when I find tape on a breaker in an elect. panel I have to ask is some one working on the wires.......... So I say you did the safest thing you could.......to get them heat.

Jack P.

God Bless Amercia...

Geez, I've been a landlord for 18 with 122 apartments and have been thru many many evictions. Thought I'd seen and heard it all but here's a new one. Locked out the gas value eh. God Bless America

Anna Conda

Nicest one I had was a tenant call for no heat in the suite. 12-storey building with hot-water heat. Checked the t-stat, checked the zone valve, both functioning. Checked the T off the riser, nice and hot, all hot to the manual stop valve.

Which was closed. Open the manual stop, presto - instant heat. So how'd the manual stop valve get closed? Tenant says, "Oh I turned off the tap because it sounded like there was water running through the pipe."