Floor drains in apartments

J

Junebugwhite

Registered User
Weird question for you guys! We just signed a lease for an apartment in Pacific View. I was planning on taping shut the floor drains (out of my fear of cockroaches), but when we went for the hand over they gave us a sheet on floor drain safety. It says you need to pour water down them once a week. Did some research and apparently floor drains were blamed for SARs outbreak in one infamous building. Any insight would be appreciated. :)

The apartment stuff can be so confusing, there is a switch for the water heaters? Do we leave them on all the time or just right before you shower/do laundry? When I asked the building management they just looked at me like I was crazy.
 
Can't really answer for the floor drain, never heard about that before... about the water heaters, yes there are switch, and so far it's been like that in all the appartment we've been into. We just switch it on in the morning, and off in the evening, as we use the hot water many times during the day.
 
i would say that it depends on how often you use the hot water. i NEVER left it on. i've had both electric and gas. i think leaving the gas heater on all of the time is just too dangerous if you are not at home. for the electric, i just turned it on when i turned on the light.... not difficult.

our current place has the kind of water heater we had in canada, a large one that sits on our roof and has a tank... when you use up your tank of hot water, you have to wait about 2 hours for more hot water. i MUCH prefer the other water heaters that heat water as you use it... you NEVER run out of hot water! wonderful inventions!
 
Don't know about the SARS thing but we had a problem with smelly drains in our last apartment (we were on the 9th floor). We were pouring drain cleaner, bleach all sorts down it but couldn't get rid of the smell. Eventually spoke to one of the guys in our management office he said you just need to pour hot water down it and the smell will go away. At the time we thought that the guy was just fobbing us off but we tried it anyway and the smell went more or less straightaway. We recently moved and had a similar problem with smells coming from one of the bathrooms, boiled up a couple of kettles of water, poured it down the drain and the smell's disappeared.

I think that depending on the way your pipes are laid out, sometimes stagnant water accumlates so the flushing of the pipes with some hot water moves it along. As for cockroaches, I don't think they always come up the drains so even if you tape them up unfortunately there are other ways for them to make it in.
 
i know what you are talking about re drains... we pour diluted bleach down them once a week to clean them out of whatever might grow in there. we also seal them, and so we change the tape every week when we pour the bleach down them. sometimes there might be some "steam" kind of thing and so we change it too - doesn't take a lot of time but i feel much better doing so. as we are on the 1st floor something always manages to come up - but at least psychologically i'm more relaxed

as for the hot water - we only turn it on when before we need it (the one in the kitchen is on more regularly as we are always using hot water) cause with kids i'm always scared of it over heating...our building is 40 years old!
 
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