The Running Toilet Book: Chapter 4 — People Depend on Systems (LeakBird)

Apr.21, 2009 in Prop Management, Running Toilets, Water Bills

The manager relies on systems, the leader relies on people.

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Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Murphy’s Law

When it comes to running toilets, you can’t rely on your tenants to report them, unless you have a system in place. In other words, people depend on systems. Chapters 5 and 6 will explore systems in further detail by elaborating on the two different methods, which are most effective in alerting tenants to a running toilet condition.

Property managers are often called on to be leaders, but let’s admit, that’s not their number one concern. We only need to look at their title, which has the word manager in it.

From the property management perspective systems are everything. Spanning the gamut from actual physical building systems, such as HVAC, electrical and plumbing, all the way to legal systems for building code and rental agreements, property management, perhaps more obviously than most any other vocation, depends on systems to run effectively.

The problem of the running toilet is connected to, is effected by, or effects several property management systems. Let’s name the four most obvious –

Water Systems

Plumbing Systems

Tenant Systems

Financial Systems

Water Systems

In order for the water systems to be functional, they have to be secure, at the municipal as well as the individual building level. Because a running toilet can easily waste three gallons of water per minute, the water supply of the particular building in question is anything but secure when a toilet goes unchecked for any period of time. An unsecure water supply is most immediately reflected by the water bill.

Most water bills received by property managers are bi-monthly and water consumption over a period of time is denominated in units of 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons of water. When a toilet has been running for a week in a city that has high water rates, several tens of thousands of gallons of water can quickly and easily add up to a $500.00 increase in the water bill.

From time to time, there are going to be other in-building leaks, such as running faucets, but 90 percent of the time the problem happens in the toilet. We could say that the water systems or supply are also a component in the plumbing systems.

Plumbing Systems

Obviously the plumbing systems involve the toilet fixture. As we’ve said earlier in the book, it’s a known fact that toilets run no matter if you’ve installed Niagara’s flapper-less toilet or Rube Goldberg’s golden flapper.

So, of course it’s important to have functional plumbing fixtures. Each plumbing fixture is a system in and of itself. As we can see, in property management there are systems within systems.

Basically, because a toilet’s parts wear down over time, it’s bound to run or leak at some point. We can paraphrase Murphy’s Law by stating that stuff does and will happen from time to time, especially if it can happen.

A running toilet may occur for a myriad of reasons. To name a few:

Chloramine wore down the flapper

The chain got caught

The flush valve isn’t closing properly due to sediment

The refill valve is water-logged

The gasket seal is decrepit

The lift rod got detached

The stopper got split

The trap handle is too loose

Tenant Systems

We all know that there are forms the tenants are supposed to fill out in order to report any problems, which may be occurring in their unit. Tenant reporting is a part of the tenant systems. Tenant reports can be of multiple levels of urgency, from the slightly dripping leaky faucet to the faulty front door lock.

Property managers have to rely on their tenants to some degree to report problems occurring in their units. But more often than not the squeaky wheel gets the grease, in other words, the tenants who speak up are the ones who get to benefit, as, for example, in the case of the sealing off of an old window which loses heat during winter, in a city like Chicago, for which the tenant pays the bill.

All landlords have systems in place for dealing with tenant issues and reports, which arise in the course of any month. And if they don’t have strong tenant systems in place, they’re more than likely to be buried in requests or completely incompetent.

The running toilet more often than not goes unreported until it’s too late. This is a major problem, because it’s expensive. We can say that:

Toilets run and

Tenants cannot be relied upon to report them

Financial Systems

A high water bill can be hard on the bottom line. It actually has the potential to put a landlord into the red for the month when it comes to profits. The high cost of the running toilet can seriously rupture the landlord’s cash flows, another reason to always have reserves on hand for any issues which may come up in property management.

Financial systems cannot be said to be secure if a running toilet or two may occur in any given month.

It All Boils Down to the Toilet

If we consider these four systems, we can see that a secure water supply and secure financial cash flows depend upon a secure toilet, that is, the plumbing systems. Because we know that there is no such thing as a secure toilet nor are tenants incentivized to report a running toilet condition, we must admit that we need a system which does two things:

Will pinpoint the problem and

Incentivize the tenant to report the problem

But how to do this?

We’ll address this question in chapter 5.

If you are interested in How You Can Increase Your Cash Flows by $2,500.00 Every Year and Never Pay for High Water Bills Due to Your Tenants’ Running Toilets, sign up for our Free Report here.

Abendigo Reebs is the VP of Business Development for LeakBird Industries LLC in San Francisco, CA. He may be reached at by email at jordan@leakbird.com

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