Water Shut-Offs

By John Raabe

I’ m sure everyone here has received an email notifying you of a water shut off scheduled in your building. Sometimes it’ s for boiler repairs, but most often it’ s for a unit repair. I wanted to write to you all this month and give you a little idea of what goes on during these shut-offs, and why it's important to notify the Association at least two days in advance (whenever possible) when you need to have major plumbing work done.

The most common reason we need to turn off the water to the building is the replacement of unit valves. These are typically caught when a plumber arrives to do some standard maintenance and they are unable to turn off the unit's water. Occasionally, we have emergency valve issues, where a resident went to shut off the valve and broke and is leaking water, or they came back in town and turned it on and it did not open back up. We have also had toilet or refrigerator supply lines break while people are out of town causing extensive damage to surrounding units before the source is found. We ask that, if you are leaving town, you shut off the water to your unit to help prevent this. Even if you are home and something like this happens, if your shut off valves do not work there will be no way to quickly stop the flow of water. We have to shut off the whole building and drain it, so it will be a while before that water actually stops, causing a lot of damage. So all we ask is that, once a month, you turn the valves off then back on about five times (and while doing this make sure that they actually shut the water off).

If you are having issues with your shut off valves you need to call a plumber and let that plumber know the we require at least 48 hours notice when shutting off the valves, unless it is an emergency, and we do not shut off the water until the plumber is on site, ready to make the repairs. These replacements should be scheduled for the morning, around 9am, so that if there is a complication there is plenty of rectify it before the evening.

Aa stated earlier, another reason we need to shut off the water to your building is boiler repairs. This usually only requires the hot water to be shut off, but sometimes they need to replace some valves and we need to shut off the cold for a little bit while they do that. The most common reason for this shut off is to replace one of the pumps that moves the hot water through the lines, but sometimes they need to replace parts in the boiler itself. Since I’ ve been at Toscana we ’ ve had one tank replacement that needed the water to be shut off.

The last reason we may need to shut off water to the building is the valves for the water softeners. These do go bad also and if we need to replace one we have to shut off all water coming into the building and also drain the entire building which may take a little while.

We may also call your stack and ask that you not use one your sinks or dishwasher. This happens because one of the units below you is experiencing a backup from something that was put down the garbage disposal that shouldn ’t have been, and you using them will cause more water to come up and cause damage.

We try and give residents as much notice as possible when these things are going on, but as we all know life is unexpected and when it comes to water we have to act fast to try and stop as much damage as possible.