Tenant quits lease after apartment hits almost 44C, bond refunded
By Tracy Neal, Open Justice multimedia journalist of
File pic
Photo:
123RF
A tenant says the sweltering heat inside their apartment reached temperatures well into the 40s - ruining a laptop, killing pot plants and requiring medicines to be stored in a car where it was cooler.
Now the tenant has been allowed to break a year-long lease and get their bond back, a month after moving in.
It comes after NZME reported concerns this year that tens of thousands of Auckland families would suffer in overheating terraced houses and vulnerable people could risk "dying of heatstroke" unless construction designs changed.
That story described how large windows, a lack of eaves or other shade, no consideration of a property's direction towards the sun and poor ventilation were causing overheating in old and new builds.
In this instance, the tenant, whose name was suppressed after a Tenancy Tribunal hearing, said the excessive heat inside their one-bedroom, sixth-floor apartment was evident soon after moving in.
The building, in an undisclosed location, was managed by a body corporate, but the landlord remained liable to the tenant under the rental agreement and by law.
On a day in March this year, the tenant recorded the temperature inside the east-facing unit at 43.6C before midday.
The next day, the mercury had risen to 38.5C before 9am, even with the living room window open and after the air conditioning had been running, according to evidence presented to the tribunal.
The tenant said it was difficult to sleep in such heat, pot plants didn't last beyond a day and that it was not safe storing a co-tenant's medication inside the apartment, so they left it in a car.
The tenant said the heat had caused the battery in a laptop to expand, damaging the computer beyond repair.
The tenant also said the windows in the apartment did not open wide enough to allow sufficient draught, but the landlord disagreed and suggested the tenants "had not been using them properly".
The landlord also took temperature readings in the living room with the curtains closed and then open.
The afternoon temperatures, 26.4C and 28.3C were high, the tribunal said, but not as high as those recorded by the tenant.
The landlord also produced a Healthy Homes Standards report showing that the unit complied with the applicable ventilation requirements.
In a recently released decision, the tribunal ordered the $2440 bond be returned to the tenant, plus partial reimbursement of electricity charges it cost to run air conditioning, over and above standard power charges.
The tenant was surprised to receive two invoices totalling $96 to cover the cost of running the heat pump/air conditioning unit while they lived there.
However, the landlord said they had explained at the start of the tenancy that the power supply to the air conditioning unit, which was based on usage only, was controlled by the body corporate and invoiced separately.
The tenant paid the invoices but claimed there was insufficient evidence to support the calculation of the charges or to prove the usage claimed was exclusively attributable to themselves.
The landlord produced spreadsheets provided by the body corporate, which they claimed set out how the charges were calculated.
The tribunal said that based on the evidence, it accepted the tenant's submission that the method of calculation was unclear, but there was no dispute that the tenant had used the air conditioning unit and was therefore liable for some of the costs claimed.
The tenant's application to reduce the fixed term was dismissed.
Agreement was instead reached between the tenant and landlord to end it earlier than the contracted date.
A new tenancy began on 11 April, the tribunal said.
The New Zealand Property Investors Federation told NZME that investors should do due diligence on any property they buy, especially in light of recent media coverage about hot townhouses.
Advocacy manager Matt Ball said there was nothing in the tribunal's decision, or in general, to say that new townhouses would not make a good investment.
He said there were opportunities for investors willing to do any necessary remedial work, such as installing ventilation or air conditioning.
-This story originally appeared in the
New Zealand Herald
.
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