Dehumidifier - who pays?

balibali293

I am renting a property through an estate agent and the landlord has refused to to anything about the damp for 3+ years. Now the estate agent has changed hands and the council environmental officers have stated that there are dangerous spores on the walls that have to be dealt with. So, the estate agent have sent an industrial dehumidifier around to be left on 24 hours a day for a week. But viewing our electricity meter, it appears that the dehumidifier will cost over £100 to run for the week. The estate agent basically said that we have to swallow the costs.

Is this right? Especially after a recent rent increase. We reported the damp years ago and if he had acted then, it wouldn't be such a big job.

Bigphil1474

Get in touch with the Environmental Health at the council - I believe it is the landlords responsibility to deal with any issues of fitness of the property, so it shouldn't be at your expense. However, the rules vary from council to council as not all the legislation is national - there may be local byelaws, or adopted (or not) legislation that applies. If they can't help, then try CAB.

st999

If your dehumidifier is using over £100 of electricity in a week I would get it seen to.

http://www.sust-it.net/dehumidifier-running-costs-energy-efficiency.php

CashStrapped

How and where is the damp appearing?

poppellerant

st999 wrote: »

If your dehumidifier is using over £100 of electricity in a week I would get it seen to.

http://www.sust-it.net/dehumidifier-running-costs-energy-efficiency.php

I don't know if 3kW dehumidifiers exist, but if they do and you run one 24 hours a day then we can quadruple the prices in your link, which is "based on 12 hours a day", to £78.12.

So I could perhaps believe the OP is running a 3kW dehumidifier 24 hours at an additional weekly cost of nearly £80 to them, but £100 is certainly seems to be an exaggeration.

Who pays this cost? I think it should be down to the landlord. You're helping them out by letting them run a dehumidifier in your rented house first place which (hopefully) helps to fix or alleviate any problems. Perhaps the landlord should be forced to reduce the rent by £80/week to coverage the operating costs of the dehumidifier until they address the root cause of the problem.