Hi,
I’ve been renting a room in an appartment for a few months, the other roomates and myself all pay rent directly to the landlord.
Our water heater as been broken for almost 3 weeks now, and despite his promises the landlord hasn’t fixed it yet.
What are our recourses ? I’m done taking a cold shower every morning, makes me hate everything about life ugh… Can I find a repairman myself and deduct the amount of the repairs of my rent ?
Thank you for your help
That’s what I would do, but tell him you’re doing it first. If he thinks you find someone, he will have it done tomorrow.
Edit if you use electric. The heating element in Taiwan get totally caked in calcium and need to be repaired frequently. If it’s just that it’s usually under 1000
Cold showers are good for you. I disconnected my gas a month ago and I’ll get a new heater once it cools down.
Check the outside of the heater. There might be a phone number. Otherwise just Google the brand and the Chinese for maintenance. Get a guy round to repair it and deduct it from the rent. Totally within your rights.
Thank you for your replies !
Are you sure it’s broken and doesn’t just have a dead battery or something simple? Give the landlord 2 days to fix it or else you’ll have someone fix it and deduct the cost from the rent.
yep, check the battery
Yeah I tried 2 different batteries that I purchased myself
Remember it has to be the cheapest low end batteries. Anything fancy like Duracell will not work. And I am not kidding. It has to do with composition and charge. Seriously.
As to myself, I do not use hot water at all, even in winter. It is only for Bobby. In this Friggin heat, water comes down warm from the pipes anyways.
Not sure of the science behind that! Any batteries worked in mine. What can can happen is either the contacts have corroded and need to be cleaned up before a new battery will work or the contacts have weakened over time, low end batteries are often slightly oversize and so make better contact but spread the contacts meaning normal sized batteries don’t fit well after them.
Best to first check the physical condition of the contacts then turn the hot tap on full, go to water heater and jiggle the battery around, if it fires even momentarily you know you have battery and/or contact issues.
Actually I got the lecture several times from 3 different local shuiedienhan repairmen. Something about chrome or whatever the batteries had. My local roommates also repeated this mantra. As it worked, well, it ain’t stupid.
For the most part, the last people I would expect to have proper technical knowledge of how anything related to water and/or electricity worked are the local shui-dian repairmen!
How dare you, how very dare you. Those guys are the creme de la creme. 
At least it’s summer and not winter!
You probably cannot repair it, you need to change the heater to a new one. I changed my heater late last year and if I remember correctly I that one was 20k, but I’m sure you can find a much cheaper one
I repaired mine last year. Sometimes it’s just a broken component that can be swapped out. The guy did say though that next time I’d have to buy a new one as my current one is over 10 years old. Hence it’s now not working.
I didn’t know you liked to troll.
Unfortunately, it works, so it ain’t trolling.
The chemical composition of the battery does make an electronic device to work or not. It’s voltage and amperage what the device needs, and it doesn’t matter how it is generated. If you plug that to enough potatoes it will work too.
The type of battery affects how steady the output is (if there’s a decay in terms of volts as the battery drains).
Again I’m not an expert and my days studying these things at school are far and blurry, so someone else can correct me if I made some mistake. But I’m 100% sure that what’s inside the battery is not relevant.
TBH, I am not aware of the science behind it. All I know is that my cheapie water heater only takes cheapie batteries.
What’s the background on the water heaters using batteries and not connected to the grid ? Also Why you need electricity in the heater to start with ? In hk they also got these gas heaters but they don’t need electricity to work