I'm currently renting a student house on an assured shorthold tenancy agreement.
The house is literally falling down, the front wall already has done!
The heating has worked for 3 days this year and we have now got no hot water either.
All sorts of things have gone wrong with the house, some serious others annoying. Our letting agent is rude and aggressive towards us, they literally hang the phone up when they don't like what you're saying and if you go into the office the manager just starts shouting. They seem to completely ignore anything that doesn't suit them and constantly change their story on reported issues. In the past they have come round, fixed a reported problem, then sent us an invoice for an unnecessary call out.
To cut to the chase we have major concerns about gas safety and electrical safety in the house.
Gas safety issues
This is the real biggie that reared its ugly head on Friday night!
I went to our students union advice centre to talk about our various on going issues and returned at about 3pm to find the gas engineer carrying out the annual gas safety check on the boiler. We saw that he had striped the boiler down and spent sometime fiddling with bits of it, we have since been advised by several people that this was not part of the gas safety checks. When he left he made a comment that we find disturbing "all is safe but I will get ****** to service it" (referring to the letting agent).
At 7.45pm we found the conservatory, where the boiler is, full of thick white smoke. We called the gas emergency line and an engineer came round to make the gas safe. He marked the boiler 'unsafe' and said he was confused as to why it had been taken apart in the first place and clearly put back together incorrectly. He also replaced a piece of pipe between the gas shut off valve and the meter, which he described as a "museum piece" (says it all really!) and felt was so unsafe he replaced it despite it not being the reason for the call out.
We contacted the letting agent on Saturday morning, who was very keen to get the engineer to come and fix it straight away. We insisted that we would get Gas Safe to inspect the boiler before any work was done, this upset him greatly and resulted in lots of shouting at us, but in the end he couldn't actually say no.
Electrical safety issues
Regarding the electrical side of things our main concerns are:
We have two conventional wall mounted light switches (one of which is ancient) in a downstairs shower room. Is this legal (remember this is a rented property so the rules are even stricter)?
The main trip switch and electricity meter is located in the shower room, admittedly it is high up and in a cupboard, but this still defies common sense and is it legal?
The house has a lot of fairly pre-historic looking light switches, some of which emit visible sparks when you turn them on and off. The letting agent has assured us they are safe, we don't think so. Are they also still legal?
One of these old light switches has a crack in the casing (see photo), the letting agent has assured us it is safe, again we are not convinced.
The kitchen has 6 downlights, the 250V 50W style ones, we have gone through 9 light bulbs since September, we used to buy Tesco Value 250V 50W bulbs, these would blow within a few days. We have now started buying the expensive 35W bulbs (the light fittings are marked 250V 50W) which last a bit longer. Surely bulb consumption like this is ridiculous, the letting agent again claims there is nothing wrong with the wiring.
We also have sockets that don't work in the house, the letting agents explanation is that these are disconnected and perfectly safe. This seems very unusual to us, why you would want to disconnect sockets seems hard to understand and we suspect they haven't been intentionally disconnected. In any case it seems incredibly pointless and sloppy workmanship to disconnect a power socket and leave it in the wall.
The smoke alarm doesn't work, even with a new battery the test button does nothing.
One of the less important but still irritating issues the kitchen tap constantly drips and the seal is so knackered (half of it is hanging out of the tap) when you turn it on more water pisses out the joint than actually out the tap (see picture!).
If anybody has got previous experiences like this or any idea on what laws and regulations could be being broken in our house I'd be very interested.
Our students union advice centre have been very helpful throughout and advised us on several occasions to call environmental health, we never have done because we have tried to avoid antagonising the letting agent/landlord more than we have too. Previously they've always fixed or at least botched up the problems before we've got to that stage. Now though we are considering whether it is worth doing so given that we have now been directly put at risk by the letting agent and their shady sub-contractors.
The house is literally falling down, the front wall already has done!
The heating has worked for 3 days this year and we have now got no hot water either.
All sorts of things have gone wrong with the house, some serious others annoying. Our letting agent is rude and aggressive towards us, they literally hang the phone up when they don't like what you're saying and if you go into the office the manager just starts shouting. They seem to completely ignore anything that doesn't suit them and constantly change their story on reported issues. In the past they have come round, fixed a reported problem, then sent us an invoice for an unnecessary call out.
To cut to the chase we have major concerns about gas safety and electrical safety in the house.
Gas safety issues
This is the real biggie that reared its ugly head on Friday night!
I went to our students union advice centre to talk about our various on going issues and returned at about 3pm to find the gas engineer carrying out the annual gas safety check on the boiler. We saw that he had striped the boiler down and spent sometime fiddling with bits of it, we have since been advised by several people that this was not part of the gas safety checks. When he left he made a comment that we find disturbing "all is safe but I will get ****** to service it" (referring to the letting agent).
At 7.45pm we found the conservatory, where the boiler is, full of thick white smoke. We called the gas emergency line and an engineer came round to make the gas safe. He marked the boiler 'unsafe' and said he was confused as to why it had been taken apart in the first place and clearly put back together incorrectly. He also replaced a piece of pipe between the gas shut off valve and the meter, which he described as a "museum piece" (says it all really!) and felt was so unsafe he replaced it despite it not being the reason for the call out.
We contacted the letting agent on Saturday morning, who was very keen to get the engineer to come and fix it straight away. We insisted that we would get Gas Safe to inspect the boiler before any work was done, this upset him greatly and resulted in lots of shouting at us, but in the end he couldn't actually say no.
Electrical safety issues
Regarding the electrical side of things our main concerns are:
We have two conventional wall mounted light switches (one of which is ancient) in a downstairs shower room. Is this legal (remember this is a rented property so the rules are even stricter)?
The main trip switch and electricity meter is located in the shower room, admittedly it is high up and in a cupboard, but this still defies common sense and is it legal?
The house has a lot of fairly pre-historic looking light switches, some of which emit visible sparks when you turn them on and off. The letting agent has assured us they are safe, we don't think so. Are they also still legal?
One of these old light switches has a crack in the casing (see photo), the letting agent has assured us it is safe, again we are not convinced.
The kitchen has 6 downlights, the 250V 50W style ones, we have gone through 9 light bulbs since September, we used to buy Tesco Value 250V 50W bulbs, these would blow within a few days. We have now started buying the expensive 35W bulbs (the light fittings are marked 250V 50W) which last a bit longer. Surely bulb consumption like this is ridiculous, the letting agent again claims there is nothing wrong with the wiring.
We also have sockets that don't work in the house, the letting agents explanation is that these are disconnected and perfectly safe. This seems very unusual to us, why you would want to disconnect sockets seems hard to understand and we suspect they haven't been intentionally disconnected. In any case it seems incredibly pointless and sloppy workmanship to disconnect a power socket and leave it in the wall.
The smoke alarm doesn't work, even with a new battery the test button does nothing.
One of the less important but still irritating issues the kitchen tap constantly drips and the seal is so knackered (half of it is hanging out of the tap) when you turn it on more water pisses out the joint than actually out the tap (see picture!).
If anybody has got previous experiences like this or any idea on what laws and regulations could be being broken in our house I'd be very interested.
Our students union advice centre have been very helpful throughout and advised us on several occasions to call environmental health, we never have done because we have tried to avoid antagonising the letting agent/landlord more than we have too. Previously they've always fixed or at least botched up the problems before we've got to that stage. Now though we are considering whether it is worth doing so given that we have now been directly put at risk by the letting agent and their shady sub-contractors.
