Who is responsible for payment?

[regrow]

Hi All

Have had tenants ask that a electrician is called out because they say light bulbs keep blowing.

Now these lights are the same as in my house as I purchased them at the same time and had them installed by the same guy. That was in 2007 when we built the 2 houses at the same time.

I have only had to replace a few light bulbs in my place in the same time frame and mainly the kids bed room lights as these are used the most.

I instructed the managing agent to get a electrician out to check things over straight away. The electrician found no faults and he has advised my rental manager that there is no easy answer as it is just one of those things and sometimes no faults are found.

My question is can i get the tenants to pay the cost of the call out?

Regards

 

[Lawry]

tricky. we had similar issues with one tenant, never really got resolved (sparky found no real fault) , tenant moved out at lease end. new tenant hasn't complained. Some of the globes in our PPOR seem to go "Too often" so who knows..? Can you get the tenants to pay call out? hmm awkward at this stage I'd say

 

[Fourex]

Maybe in hindsight or for next time you may want to have said:

If you believe there is a fault we will despatch an electrician to fix the fault, if however no fault is found then you (the tenant) will pay for the call out fee.

We said that to our last tenant and have not heard another word from them about their last issue (something about TV reception).

Fourex.

 

[Sim]

It might be possible that the tenant just bought a bad batch of globes?

 

[RenterOwner]

I think this can sometimes depend on some factors that are outside anyone's control. Light bulbs would blow frequently in a house we owned in a small town; I had the wiring checked and was told that everything was fine and that the reason for the bulbs blowing so often was that we were 'too close' to the power station. I have no idea if that was the reason or not, but we just accepted that we would be constantly replacing bulbs. It was our PPOR at the time so couldn't blame tenants lol.

We had quite frequent blackouts too - if there was a bad storm we'd know to get the candles out, we ending up being more surprised if there wasn't a blackout than if there was yet the other side of town rarely had blackouts.