Condominium - emergency water shut off

In theory, an association is damned if it allows such a practice and damned if it does not. Where I come down:

-- If a water line breaks inside a wall, lots of property damage may result. Shutting off the water sooner may minimize this damage. No threat to life is likely.

-- But owners having the ability to shut off the water on a whim, maybe to do their own repairs, also has a huge effect on the other owners.

-- I am also not wild about inexperienced people operating valves. Some water shut-off valves are not that easy to figure out, to a layperson.

I would vote to allow only authorized HOA staff to turn off the water. Wherever possible, notification will be at least 24 hours before the shut-down. Notification will be by email blast, posted flyers and possibly individual flyers and door-knocking.

Of the utmost importance to convey to owners: No perfect solution that will please all exists. The board does the best it can to maximize good outcomes for as many people as possible.

Many condo buildings' plumbing often does not have a single, main water line supplying each unit. Renovation to do so is also often not possible, short of totally demo-ing the building and re-building from the ground up.

Apartments converted to condominiums are particularly vulnerable to being stuck with one meter serving several units.

we offer one free water shut off each month. Any other shut off is owners expense and they post the flyers.

We have investor bully that feels every owner should know how to turn the water off even thou we have a boiler system.

how do you handle if it's an emergency?

This wouldn’t be an issue if everyone had an individual water line, but your building isn’t built that way. Some people wouldn’t need to be told to (1) call a plumber to look at THEIR problem, (2) notify the property manager if a shut off for the entire building is warranted, (3) and have the plumber speak to him or her and (4) if a buildingwide shutoff is warranted, notify everyone else.

If emergency action is necessary, it helps to have an automated phone message system, coupled with an email blast – I’d encourage homeowners to provide both their landline (if others still have those besides me!) AND cell numbers

This is a STOOPID idea. You don’t say how old your building is, but if you have valves that haven’t been turned in years and someone tries to force the issue, the valve might break and cause all sorts of problems. I suspect your master insurance carrier would have a few issues with this as well.

Sounds like you don't have an emergency policy - in my community, we have an on-call property manager for a lot of this stuff, and of course, the water, gas and electric companies have their ways of addressing emergencies, so you need to set up one post haste. If you have a plumbing company who works in your building regularly, talk to their representatives for ideas, as well as your insurance carrier - starting with defining what an emergency is.

In fact, since we are talking about emergencies, maybe now would be a good time to review all your utility lines there could be emerging problems that need to be addressed and you can tailor your policy to things like smelling gas, fallen electrical power lines, etc. Major repairs and replacements to your systems should already be addressed in your reserve study (if you haven’t done one ever, or the last one is older than 5 years, time for an update).

As for the bully investor, I already give them a side eye due to the chaos some caused in my community and I STILL don’t feel sorry for them - tell this guy to go touch grass. He’s the one who chose to buy a condo or several and thus became a business partner with everyone else, so it’s not about him. I know things can get tricky when someone owns a considerable number, but if he doesn’t like others to share in the decision-making, he needs to go to a bank or someplace and make an offer to buy the entire building for a competitive price. Then everyone can move out and he can run the building as he sees fit. Instead these guys and gals figure if they buy in a condo association or HOA, they save money on maintenance because of economy of scale, and there’s a property manager who can do the heavy lifting in managing whoever he or she rents to while they sit back and collect rent checks.

Tell your. investor the HOA is more than willing to accept his donation to accomplish individual shut off to each unit.

There should currently be a shut offs at each faucet and toilet now to facilitate spot maintenance - although the valves are probably beyond service life and will leak it moved.

Our property manager has an oncall person.