Another vote for “My cats seem quite happy when the temps are around 90”. At least, the cat who is allowed to go outside will beg to do so when it’s hot out. True, she will then lie on a piece of slate and not move, but she seems happy in the heat. I think you over-reacted, and your cats would have been fine there.
And I don’t think you can get the landlord to pay for boarding your pets.
I won’t mention names, but that’s exactly the thread I was thinking of when I read this one.
In re-reading my earlier post, it seems unnecessarily snarky. I mean, that’s the way I feel about the OP’s post, but I also hope that she/he and the kitties are going to be okay.
Part of me –the grumpy, old man part- rolls my eyes to think that folks expect to have AC all.the.time. It’s also a bit of a stretch to imagine that 90F is “too hot” for a pussy cat (or a human). Rhetorically; didn’t both species evolve without the benefit of air conditioning? Another part of me – the cynical part- thinks the OP’s would be a good subject to troll with.
Either way, I do hope everyone is enjoying cooler temps by now.
We as a species may have evolved without the benefit of air conditioning but some modern housing may be uncomfortable or worse without it. (Just as we evolved without the benefit of electricity, but you’re still going to be uncomfortable when that goes out.)
I’m almost 40 and I’ve lived most of my life without air conditioning. In a rough summer it can be uncomfortable but a fan and a couple of open windows should be enough. Only recently did we get air conditioning in my house, and wow is it great, but it’s still a luxury. Even living on Guam for a couple years I got by without it in most places (in the car, at school, and so on).
The question about the cats has been pretty well handled but now I’m wondering: might the OP be due some kind of remuneration from the landlord for failing to provide services designated in the lease?
While 90 degrees isn’t comfortable, it’s survivable unless you have health issues. Nonetheless, the lease says “air conditioning is included” and they’re not living up to that. The service company is clearly run by idiots - it does NOT take that long to replace a compressor (I’ve had entire new systems put in place in 72 hours from signing the contract).
I’m thinking that in March they simply triaged your problem and decided it was lower priority since March is NOT a peak air conditioning month. Still, whatever they did was clearly defective.
I think we’re into an area of unreasonable expectations here. From what the OP posted, sounds like the manager called the HVAC company the next day, and the HVAC company showed up the day after that. Last we heard the part was on order.
Whatever the problem is with the HVAC company, it’s quite a reach for the tenant to sue the landlord for the behavior of another company. Generally speaking, the landlord needs only make an honest effort to gets things fixed. Having a part on back order is a fact of life, you might have had the same issue if you had chosen to repair your old system rather than replacing it.
Really? That is an interesting legal theory you have there.
Say you give ask me to deliver a package across town and give me $100. I give the package to an honest looking fellow who has a car and tells me he’ll drop it off there. The package doesn’t show up. Do you think it’s reasonable for me to say “Hey not my responsibility. Go find the guy with the package.”
Seriously, you think you can keep collecting money for a service that includes air conditioning and tell the person paying YOU that it’s no longer your problem and someone else’s responsibility to provide it?
I would be surprised if it did.
By and large, compensation to a consumer is punitive on the service provider, so that the provider provider doesn’t knowingly provide a poor service.
Since you can’t show the AC should have been pre-emptively serviced… The assumption is that there really is no way to know when its going to fail …
90 F isn’t so hot for the pet or you, a few days without food is not causing any stress, you really have no issue. Since both cats are sick the same way it seems they have a pathogen not heat stress. Heat stress would normally be very individual in effect.
I would think if you where renting and it was in your lease that you where supplied AC, then you should have access to AC and if not maybe you can deduct some portion of your rent because of discomfort.
… as far as your cats go, unless there is something unusual about your breed of cat— like maybe they are a super furry Persian breed from whose descendants come from Iceland, they should be able to handle 90 degree temps. However if your rental suddenly went from 70 degree AC all the time to 90 degrees overnight, perhaps it shocked their system causing lack of appetite, dehydration. Cats don’t do well at all if they get dehydrated and go down hill quickly, kidneys stop functioning and then they can’t absorb water they drink and its just downhill from there. You are a good owner for taking them to the vet.
Bolding mine
Why are you assuming the HVAC company isn’t licensed, bonded and insured? In you analogy, replace what I bolded with “USPS, UPS or FedEx”. Now you drag me into a court of law claiming I was something other than completely honest by hiring a national famous shipping company to send your package. I have the receipt and tracking information and see here where the truck with your package was waiting at a railroad crossing when the oil train blew up. Sorry, your package was destroyed.
The fun part for me is listen to your rebuttal and then the judge screaming at you for wasting his/her time.
Setting that aside, my post that you responded to is less legal theory and more actual written law. So of course this might be different in your jurisdiction, but I seriously doubt it. A good rule of thumb is for the tenant to think the place was theirs. Now how long would it take to fix something? Best you could do is call the HVAC company the next day, the service guy comes out the following day and orders the part … exactly the same as what the OP said happened … that’s life, get over it.
Another consideration is market conditions. If there’s a 10% or 15% vacancy rate in the local area, yeah the manager will be bending over backwards to keep the tenant, and yeah the manager would be smart to cut the tenant some slack on the rent paid. However, if the vacancy rate is closer to 1%, the manager more likely will tell the tenant to just move out if they don’t like it, it’s only going to take six hours to move someone else in.
While not entirely disagreeing with you, I think that US law would be very similar to UK law here, in that the tenant has a contract with the landlord, set out in a tenancy agreement of some kind. To take any action against the landlord he would have to show a failure to observe that agreement and it may hinge on some actual wording about the services provided.
If the agreement was drawn up by a competent lawyer, they will be plenty of weasel phrases like “as soon as practicable” and “minimal disruption.” All the landlord has to do is to show that he took “reasonable” steps to resolve the problem. If a part is hard to find, that is no fault of his.
The analogy above, of taking a package for delivery and passing (ie - subcontracting) all or part of the process to others is so standard in the delivery business that there is ample case law to cover just about any situation. I used to deal with shipping goods across Europe before the EU. A local van might collect and sign for some goods in Italy; pass them to an Italian haulier who takes them to a hub in Paris, where they are passed to a Hungarian haulier for shipment to a UK hub and then to a local carrier for the final stretch. If the goods failed to arrive, or were short, our beef was with the original shipper not any of the carriers in between.
In most jurisdictions, a tenant cannot legally withhold rent over mere discomfort. The standard is habitability.
Hi, thread. Some of your responses are doozies, but re-reading my OP, I can see why you’d want to take me to task.
First, I wrote the OP while literally melting down at my kitchen table and metaphorically melting down over the thought that the HVAC people might take over a month to fix this again, like they did in March/April. I was kinda frazzled.
Second, I wasn’t very clear about this, but the idea of asking my apartment management for compensation for boarding my cats didn’t come from me, but from my aunt. I thought (then and now) that management was doing all they could for me while they waited for their contracted HVAC guys to respond to the issue, but my aunt kept insisting that it was my right to demand compensation. Hence my question here, to find out if she was right.
I have not requested compensation, nor do I want to, nor will I be contacting management about this issue again, except if the A/C breaks again. It was my decision to board my cats with the vet, because worrying about them while worrying about everything else was making me more frazzled, and this was one element I had within my control to straighten out for my own peace of mind. That’s not management’s responsibility.
The building supervisor updated me every day about the status of the repair, and the A/C was fixed that Friday, which was the soonest it could logistically be done. I’m satisfied with the way it was handled. My aunt keeps asking me if I’ve written management an angry letter yet, and I keep telling her that I have nothing to complain about – if there had been a time for an angry letter, it would have been in March, when I had to wait for weeks until the HVAC service even acknowledged the service request. (The explanation I got at the time was that they were newly contracted with management and were having some issues getting up to speed.) But this time, everything was handled by both management and HVAC as quickly as they could.
It would have been nice if they had offered me a window A/C unit or something to tide me over, like staying in a vacant apartment, but I didn’t ask and maybe they didn’t have any to offer. (When my washing machine broke a couple years ago, they gave me a key to an empty apartment and let me use the machine in that unit, so this wouldn’t be unheard of.)
To address some of the recent posts, I don’t have my lease in front of me, but when I read over it a couple weeks ago, I know I didn’t see a single mention of the A/C. If I had felt like I was in a position to lodge a complaint, I would have just said that central air is rare in apartments in this town, and it is (truthfully) one of the main reasons I chose to live in this building – I wouldn’t have tried to claim it as a right.
I grew up in this town, in a house with no A/C at all. I remember sleeping on my bare floor on the summer nights when the humidity made touching bed sheets unbearable. I don’t feel entitled to A/C, I feel lucky to have it now. I’ve never lodged a complaint with anyone over anything before; I’ve never even told a waiter my food was overcooked. May anyone who snorted in derision over my perceived sense of entitlement breathe more easily now. Thanks to everyone with factual replies – I’ve learned from them.
I’m glad it got resolved to your satisfaction.
It may be worth a few minutes of your time to write a non-angry letter. Just give dates of both incidents, when you reported it, how long it took to fix, etc. Politely ask for some relief on your next rent payment. Couch it in terms of “Having A/C is x% of my rent, and it was out for y% of the month, so could I be credited x*y% of my monthly rent?” If you’re a good tenant who pays on time and doesn’t cause them problems with noise, etc., the worst they’ll do is say no.
Leases very rarely provide that air conditioning is included. There is an implied warranty of habitability in every lease, but that does not necessarily mean AC in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, that fact that the apartment is air conditioned is certainly in the landlord’s sales materials and is likely an implied term of the contract. Still, as a general rule landlords have a reasonable time to make repairs. Five days is pretty standard. I would have sought an abatement of rent if the landlord took a month to fix it.