I am in the process of purchasing a condo, and I was wondering if anyone else has had this happen to them, or if it is normal and I should just accept it…
There are base board heaters in the condo that work in the same way as radiator’s, in that you don’t control whether the heat is on for the bldg, but you can control the amt of heat in your apt buying turing a knob to turn the flow of heat up or down, or off.
Well, the unit does not have the knob. The mgmnt co took them all off, with their reasoning being that if you turn off the flow in your unit, it’ll effect the flow in other units… I told them that by not having control, it effects my unit, that I do not want to be in a position to waste electricity in the winter if I am too hot by turning on the a/c, and can’t open the windows because are no screens. This practice of taking off the knobs and thereby not allowing a unit owner to control HVAC in not in the condo declarations, nor the contract.
Has anyone come across this ? Or am I the only one that thinks this is a bunch of bull ?
That’s bizarre. They’re saying you have to keep your condo at the temperature THEY want at all times.
It might be true that your turning down your heat might affect the other units (although I’ve only heard of this with forced-air systems - not HW radiators, but I’m no HVAC expert) - but if so the other condo owners can then turn their heat up or down too! It’s not like there’s going to be a giant “build-up” of heat somewhere if a lot of people turn their heat down.
I lived in an apartment with this same kind of system and I never heard of anyone else having problems just because I turned the heat down.
I am the president of my condo association, but things differ from region to region so keep your salt shaker handy.
Are you saying that, before the knob removal, everybody had a knob in their unit that affected the heat output in all the units? That just sounds plain nuts.
If I were in your position, I would question the other owners and try to find out if the management company was really authorized by the board of directors to do this. You pay for that heat (whether directly or via condo fees) so everybody in the building should have had a say (vote) in something like that. It sounds like a bunch of bull to me. If I were presented with such a proposal by an owner or somebody else on the board, I would counter-propose that an electrician should be brought in to make it so that the knobs would only affect the unit’s heaters. It seems like a simple fix to me, and one that should have had broad owner support, or at least much broader support than the current “you can have heat when we say you can have heat” system.
But before I go on much further I’d like to know a few things:
How many units are in the building?
What kind of heat (electric or gas)?
Do you pay for your electric/gas bill directly or is it covered by the condo fees?
So it’s forced hot water through a series of pipes attached to a diffuser/radiator along the baseboard. I re-affirm my “bunch of bull” statement.
Although I’ve never had such a system, I can’t see how allowing you to turn off your 'heat flow" by reducing the hot water flow through the baseboard radiators would affect the rest of the building any more than turning off your hot water spigot in the kitchen sink would affect the rest of the building.
If your place gets too hot in the winter, you’ll have to open up windows and let heat out that way. Multiply this effect by 500 and, well… what a waste.
500 units is big. My experience with condo associations in large buildings is that the board sometimes gets to pass odd-ball measures unchecked because it’s hard to get more than a 10% owner turn-out at the meetings. So the other 90% just read the meeting minutes and give implied consent by not speaking up.
As for the missing knob, two words: Monkey Wrench.