I have just had the unfortunate experience of a flatmate, who was afflicted by cancer, being found dead in his room and standing by while the police, coroner and undertakers took care of the situation and dealt with the deceased’s girlfriend and friends. The last thing the police did was to seal off the room in which he lived pending probate, so that his property would not be touched until then. They put tape around the door and stamped it and the doorway in several places. Obviously, I don’t know how long the probate will take, but his legal next of kin are abroad (this is in the Czech Republic; he is Congolese and his father is in Congo while his mother is in France). So the room may be sealed off for quite some time.
The thing is, the modem/router that provides the internet in the entire apartment (in which three of us lived before the deceased passed away) is sealed off in the room. It was left plugged in and live there. This all happened late at night (it is now 3:34 AM here) and did not involve the property manager, who I will obviously have to inform about everything tomorrow. Is the fact that the modem is plugged in in there and will remain sealed off for an indefinite period of time any cause for concern? I see two issues - what if it needs to be re-started? We’re obviously not allowed to do that now. Perhaps that won’t be necessary. But is this a fire hazard? (Not that it wasn’t turned on all the time before that, anyway?)
Before I bring this up to the property manager, I thought I’d ask if anyone sees any cause for concern here. Is it safe to just leave it as it is there, or should we call the police and ask them to unseal the door and let us move the router somewhere else?
It shouldn’t be a fire hazard (unless it was already due to weird placement or shoddy wiring or whatever), but asking to move it is still a good idea. As you say, you might need to reset it at some point.
Sorry to hear about this. I agree that it’s unlikely to be a fire hazard. If you did need to restart and you couldn’t get in, you could always of course flip the breaker on the electric box, assuming you have access to it.
You can also usually restart it remotely if you can log into it. But if you haven’t logged into it before, you may need physical access the first time.
These devices usually have some kind of passcode you need to enter to do stuff like that, which is printed on a label on the side of the router itself. If you haven’t made a note of that before, you’d be stuck over that.
Is the router actually the deceased roommate’s property? Or does the equipment belong to the ISP? Perhaps you could ask the police to unseal the room and remove the router if it can be proven that it was not their own personal property.
Alternatively, I suppose you could call the ISP and have them remotely restart the router if needed and you don’t have remote access to it.
With my ISP I can log into my account and issue the remote reset myself. That said, needing to reset a modem or router is an extremely rare occurrence in my experience.
You’re lucky. I have mine plugged into a programmable plug to reset it every 24 hours in the middle of the night. Otherwise, I would just randomly lose internet and have to restart it manually.
I know my router automatically restarts after every power interruption (of which we have had five in the past year owing to a construction project next door–we were always warned in advance). So if you can find the right breaker you can do that. Assuming the breaker box isn’t in the sealed room.
Total hijack, but I have seen devices to automatically restart a router on loss of internet access. I’ve been tempted, but it’s a short walk to my router.
The programmable plug was instituted during the kids are all on zoom classes days. Back then, a brief interruption in internet was a disproportionately BIG deal.
It’s on the renter’s name; the router just happened to be installed in that room and it serves the whole apartment,
Thank you everyone for your imput. The property manager figured we would leave it in the room for now, but he will come tomorrow to follow up on what happened and we may then come to an ultimate decision.
The risk of fire is (as others have noted) probably negligible.
And I’d guess that among the excusable reasons for entering a legally sealed room would be to deal with a device that showed signs of overheating / catching fire.
No, not literally sealed UNTIL probate. its sealed for the purpose of ensuring the beneficiary (as per will or next of kin laws there ) will get it … the police are just using a formal term instead of saying "yeah well , we just stick stuff up to make it look like we care. " … a responsible person will come to get it. Its not left open for you to raid. eg the Congo’s diplomatic representative in your country may come and get anything worthy of collecting.