You may think that owning an condo means you have the financial resources to buy a real estate property.
Believe me, you’d need more than just money to do it. A condo unit requires maintenance and repair from time to time. Sometimes if you are unlucky, as soon as your contractor finishes painting the walls and installing the fixtures, you may need to call someone to do repair works.
I can always hire someone to fix any problem, you say. Unless you have enough money to hire a licensed engineer to work for you at any time, hiring the right person is not as easy as googling a name online.
I thought that as well in the beginning. I had no desire to learn about how toilets and drains work, and I still do not. But years of dealing with maintenance problems in my units forced me to take a closer look at these issues.
For something very simple, like fixing a leaked pipe joint, you can ask your condo building’s maintenance staff to help you. However, more often than not, you have to get a very complete and clear list of parts required, and go out and buy them before any work can begin. If they do not give the proper parts information, such as size of a pipe, and the quantity of the parts needed, too bad, you have to go back to the hardware store to exchange.
Even a simple job as hiring someone to do routine cleaning of your air conditioner, which you should do at least once every six months, requires some research. You need to know that it is vital for the workers to cover the electronics before doing the cleaning, and ensure that they properly clean the back of the cold air blower on the indoor unit of your air conditioner.
Plumbing issues are the most type of condo maintenance issues that owners have to deal with.
Identifying the actual problem
Take, for example, the problem of a stinky kitchen. A tenant alerted the problem to me, and told me that the odor became unbearable near midnight.
At first, I did not know where the odor came from. I put candles and scents in the kitchen. That did not work.
Then I figured that the odor must have come from the sink, as there was no other likely source of bad smell. So I bought sink covers to try to stop the smell from coming out. I bought five of them. I even tried covering the sink top with a heavy board, and still the odor leaked out.
When I finally asked Gemini AI to figure out the problem for me, it suggested that I clean up the p tray under the sink. That was when I looked under the sink and found out that my kitchen sink did not have a p-trap.
After a while, I remembered that the contractor who renovated the apartment was the one who installed the grease trap under the sink. After he put in the grease trap, he asked me if I wanted to put in a p-trap. I had no idea why it was needed. The contractor simply said, it might smell a little. I thought that would not be a big deal, and preferred that he finished the renovation. So I did not ask him to install another device, which would require him going to get parts, and find another time to come to the apartment.
If he had told me to put in a p-trap before he installed the grease trap, I would have agreed to it.
Now, that decision had come back to haunt me.
If you do not know what a p-trap is, you are not alone. I had owned condo units for over ten years, and did not know what it is until now. It is basically a bend in the pipe that takes waste water in the kitchen sink to outside the unit. The bend will hold a little bit of water that can stop odor from seeping up from the waste water in lower floors.
Why did I not just hire a plumber and asked him to figure out the stinky sink problem, you may ask.
The answer is that I had a lot of unpleasant experiences with plumbers that I was hesitant to trust another one.
Arriving with missing tools and parts
Several years ago, I had a few times when the air conditioner cleaning crew came to my condo unit and asked to use my ladder, my bucket, and rags. I am ok with that, and in fact, when a company started charging the use of their ladder in aircon cleaning, I preferred them to use my ladder. But it just feels unprofessional.
And at times, a repair job had to be stopped, when the workers suddenly found that they needed something to complete the repair, and had to come back another time. Scheduling a time for worker to come back is always difficult. They often have to defer to their boss, and at times have to cancel an appointment at the last minute.
Almost all plumbing shops are actually just platforms
A platform is a website or mobile app that matches a home owner or tenant to a service provider. Platforms are supposed to save you time in looking for a service provider, and offer a level of screening that filter out unqualified service providers.
For my kitchen sink problem, I shortlisted three companies that I found online that Google said had good review ratings and were located not far from my condo unit. I did not know that two of them actually operate as platforms. I had thought that they were employers of good plumbers.
I first contacted Tubero Express. I told them about the odor, and said that I would like a p trap installed. I sent them a photo of the underside of the sink, and the piping connecting the drain to a grease trap, which then drained outside the property.
After three hours, at 2pm, the company said that they would send someone there shortly, between 4pm and 5pm. The estimated cost would be P6,500. It was higher than I expected, but since I wanted to get it done, I accepted it. I waited at the property from 4pm until 5:15pm, when someone called me.
The technician had arrived, so I went to his location to meet him. There, he told me that he had to look for a hardware store to buy the parts. I was not happy about that. I had expected him to start working on the p trap right away. So I cancelled the job.
The next day, I contacted Tubero Experts. I started with the same problem description and sent them a photo. Due to the experience with the earlier technician, I asked if it would be better to have someone to inspect first, so that they could figure out exactly what parts would be needed, and they said yes. So they sent someone over the next day. Inspection fee was P1,200, but deductible if I would go ahead with the repair.
The technician sent by Tubero Experts arrived ahead of time, and seemed knowledgeable in diagnosing the problem. He listed out the parts needed, and after checking the grease trap, even pointed out that the grease trap was installed the wrong way around.
He told me that he would report back to the office, and he could come back the next day to do the p-trap installation. That was on Friday.
I waited for a weekend, and no reply. On late Monday, I received a message from someone claiming to be from Tubero Experts. He was not the technician who came last Friday. He said he would send me a quote.
When I received the quote, it was P8,500, printed on a company header that was not Tubero Experts. The quote did not mention the inspection fee that I already paid, and was supposed to be deducted from the cost of the job.
I can understand why a lot of large plumbing companies became platforms. One is driven by their own plumbing staff some of whom would negotiate directly with clients and cut out the employers. Cutting out the plumbing company can benefit both the plumber and the client, since the service fee can be lower. Since some workers would do that, plumbing companies perhaps figure that they might as well hire workers as freelancers, and earn a platform fee.
Another reason is to deal with uneven demand. Without hiring a large number of workers to meet peak demand, and suffer financial losses when there is not have enough work to cover the overheads, a company can weather bad times.
However, the cost to customers is the lack of quality assurance. Tubero Express sent me a technician that was not ready to do the job.
Communication is the biggest challenge
Some plumbing companies may have good technicians, but because of poor communication skills, customers get frustrated.
When I contacted Tubero Express, they asked me to explain the service that I needed. I told them that it was for installing a p tray under my kitchen sink in order to remove odor that came from the kitchen drain. I sent them a photo that showed the existing set up. A few hours later, they said that they had scheduled a plumber to come to my place, and quoted a fee of P6,500.
