The Most Common Apartment Plumbing Problems

Chances are that you have been in that embarrassing situation where you have a guest over and they can’t flush your toilet and you have to tell them to jiggle the handle. Basic plumbing problems run the gamut in apartment buildings. And either due to absentee landlords or a lazy superintendent, it might take weeks to fix these problems. Everyone has been in one of these situations and your only wish is that a dream team of plumbers would descend on your apartment like angels to fix the problem. We can dream, can’t we? Here are some of the most common apartment plumbing problems.

First up, you’ve got your clogged drain. A clogged drain is not fun, to say the least. Whether you have just shaved or if something fell down the drain, there are a number of reasons why drains get clogged. It can be a daunting experience for any renter to have to get in there and extract whatever mystery substance might be causing the stoppage. If you can perform a simple extraction, your next step is to pour a bunch of drain clearing chemicals and hope that does the trick, but oftentimes you just wake up and find that problem has gotten worse.

Next, you’ve got your no hot water problem. This can be the worst, especially on a cold morning when all your want is a nice, hot shower. You might wish your had a plumber, like Filan and Conner Plumbing, right there working on the problem, but instead you’ve got the cold water to rudely awaken you from your early morning stupor. Also, everyone has done that thing where they just sort of wait in the lukewarm water and pray for hot water, but it never comes….ever.

Also, many a renter has been kept up at night from running toilets. For some reason when this happens we all become professional late night plumbers trying to assess the problem: jiggling the handle, flushing it a few times, taking off the lid and fiddling with the hardware and then giving up and going back to bed. Usually a plumber can perform a simple trick to make the sound go away, but it will always remain a mystery as to what that trick is.

You’ve also got the age-old malfunctioning garbage disposal. This can be a fun one, when one night you go to scrape your dinner off your plate into the sink, flip on the garbage disposal and either you get a face full of freshly pureed food or, worse, you have a couple days of food building up in there, causing the whole kitchen to stink like a garbage heap.

Lastly, everyone’s favorite, in the wintertime, is the no heat whatsoever problem. There is nothing like waking up in the middle of the night shivering cold and realizing that the heater has completely stopped working. Depending on where you live, it seems like no amount of blankets can make you warm again – the damage has been done. If you do find yourself in this situation, call a plumber when it’s light out and, in the meantime, find something fleecy or heavy to wear to bed. Sometimes a blanket will only meet you half way.