RPA Tenant Rights Blog » Utilities

Problems with Utilites

LB — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:58:04 +0000

My boyfriend and I rented from a landlord for about a year and a half. We moved out on June 27th and left the country for two months. Prior to leaving, we contacting him about switching the gas over to his name. The gas meter is in the basement of the property and they were not able to get in before we were leaving. The landlord said that would be no problem. We had been on good terms with him for our entire time there. When we came home and set up the gas for our new place, the gas company told me that the other account was still active. We had two bills for gas for two months AFTER we moved out. We conatced the landlord through email and phone calls, all which were ignored. We called the gas company again and they contacted the landlord. The landlord told them that the new tenants would be putting the gas into their name. But we have no idea if or when they would actually do that. If you could have someone else pay your gas bill, wouldn’t you? More emails and phone calls to the landlord telling him that we would be more than happy to do whatever we need to do to get this situation resolved and still no response. If the landlord continues to ignore us, and the new tenants don’t switch the gas into their name, we are stuck paying for the gas in a place that we do not live forever. I just don’t understand why he insists on screwing us over like this when we were fantastic tenants and had a friendly relationship. Suggestions?

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Problems regarding Utility Ownership

Jack Shea — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 09:09:20 +0000

Me and my other roommates are in quite a predicament regarding utilities. In our written lease agreement it states that our landlord has no obligation to cover utilties. In the beginning of the year, our landlord asked one of our roommates to put his name on the gas bill. The problem with this though is that none of our floors have control over the heat. The only working thermometer is located in the basement which causes the tennent downstairs to have complete control of the heat. It was because of this and the fact that the house has one gas line for multilple different tennents that are roommate denied acceptance to this amount of risk. Well our landlord never mentioned the gas issue for several months until just recently, in which they requested one us to put our name on the gas bill AGAIN, along with request of payment for all the previous months that we used the gas. We’ve sent them a letter explaining the matter and instead of negotiating, our landlord has sent us an ultimatium which entails shutting off the gas as of next week. If someone has any suggestions on how to handle this matter, I be very grateful.

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Apartment utilities

obie323 — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:38:37 +0000

I’m a current renter who is on a lease agreement for 12 months. My situation is regarding our utilities. We moved into our townhome on a lease agreement for 12 months @ $1345 per month. To our knowledge our utilities were paid by us in our $1345 rental amount. We signed our lease agreement and moved in June’08. We paid our deposit, pro-rated month, and got a month free. So in August we paid our $1345, and for September we have paid. Now we recently received a notice that we missed September’s $84 water, sewer, garbage bill. Which I thought was unusual because we did not receive a notice like this for August. I re-read our lease agreement which states, “Tenant will pay $84 for water, sewer, garbage.” Which is what we have done, our garbage picked up and water/sewer still working. So I called to the office to find out what the notice was about. The manager states that we did not pay the $84 charge, I then explain that our rent is $1345 and that our agreement does not state that the water,sewer, garbage was an additional $84. Our rent would then be $1429, which is more than we set up for. I then asked the manager why didn’t we receive the same notice for last month and her explanation was that maybe billing made a mistake and didn’t get it out, and since there was a mistake that she will waive that month but we still have to pay for September.

My question: is this right for the Landlord to charge and additional utility fee, even though a renters rent is signed as a set amount and on the agreement it does show the water, sewer, garbage charge but is that included with the rent?

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