The apartment we currently live in, and the apartment across the street we are moving to are currently next in the city to be scheduled to have their building wide heating system converted into an individual apartment controlled heating system.
Right now, when it’s cold, the boiler down in the basement of the apartment kicks on, and everyone has a warm apartment. While that’s nice, it’s hardly fair. If we’re gone during the day, I don’t want to pay heating expenses to keep some housewife toasty.
Our last apartment in a more popular, richer part of town had an individually controlled boiler system, which meant that every apartment could control the temperature of their own rooms. These were individually billed, so if we liked to keep our apartment warmer, we could, but no one else had to pay for us to stay toasty. If we left for a vacation, we didn’t need to pay for heat. This is cheaper, but requires the apartment owners to know how to use, and pay to install, boilers.
Right now, the apartments in this neighborhood aren’t set up this way. Their is an apartment wide vote on the issue. If enough people want to switch over, there will be some construction work, some installation work, minor parking disruptions, and increased apartment fees. There is a ballot box outside the apartment security guard room. You drop off your ballot and register the vote. They take care of the tallying and notifying the apartments of the proceedings.
The only problem with all of this is the time when they choose to tell us about what’s going on. 8:00 am! We get woken up every morning by some boring security guard talking about the various issues with the boiler once or twice a week on our security announcement speaker. He talks in a loud voice for 5 minutes. The worst part is then he says, “Okay, to repeat…” then repeats what he said ONE MORE TIME for another five minues.
I can NEVER get back to sleep after this interruption. I don’t know WHY there has to be this sort of announcement at this hour. Perhaps parents are most likely to be home at this time, but they can’t just put up a note in the elevator and be done with it? Do I really have to hear this a few times a week?
We’re moving in 2 months, so we don’t really care what they do about the issue. Our new apartment will also have to convert over to this new system. We’ll have to listen to these messages all over again.
