What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Maryland
Hi Everyone, I hope someone can give us a bit of advice.
We moved into our apartment in a suburb outside of Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2007 and recently moved out at the end of November 2008. Our landlord was a bizarre lady who never got anything done correctly, lied repeatedly about when she would show up to fix things and used illegals to perform work that they weren't qualified to do (I had to use hand signals to indicate that our window unit was leaking condensation water into our apartment because it was tilted inwards rather than outwards. He didn't know air conditioners made water. Things like this..)
The apartment was one in 12 units in an old late 1800's-built mansion that was converted into apartments in the 1920s. It is a historical registry home. In saying that the windows were drafty, and the heating/ac units in them caused a significant amount of airflow directly into our apartment from the outside. After our first few months in the apartment, while we froze to death trying to save money yet still received bills of around 200 dollars for our small two bed / 1 bath that we NEVER ran the heat in at night etc., we found out through our own investigations that our upstairs neighbors were running off our electric bill. We started turning off our fuse in the basement that didn't power anything we knew of in our apartment and suddenly it would be turned back on. Finally we found out it was running all their appliances and lights, and probably they were using it for their own heater. When confronted our landlord did nothing about this initially, told us we were making a big deal out of nothing and that they had their own "outlet" that she had installed for them before they moved in in June. They were apparently running everything in their whole apartment off this one outlet (impossible, and what about the lights etc?) The electrician who was a friend of the landlord came out to fix it and told us we were making a big deal of nothing and that it was 'just pennies' that we'd been paying for their electric. The other tenants did some 'tests' and determined they owed us $80 or something for the past three months, which was pathetically low. The landlord did nothing to intervene, and I feel she should have covered our entire bill for those months since it was impossible to determine who owed what. They paid us the money and we just bit our tongues since we didn't know what else to do.
At around the same time we were shown a copy of our neighbor's spreadsheet where they kept track of their bills. They had paid $25 in October for gas and electric!!! No one pays $25! We paid nearly 200 in November! They had paid $12 one month in august!!
Then we found out from that that we were paying for their gas as well! They told us they thought our landlord was paying for our gas bill, because they were connected in our two apartments. We were never told this and had been paying $20/month approx for both our apartments' gas bills.
After we found this out we decided they would pay us 50% of the gas bill each month. We were not told that we would have to share our bills and found this unfair.
What is the proper protocol in this situation?
We just moved out and I had another question that is a bit more pertinent about our security deposit. I was just wondering if there was something we should have done differently or if this is something we could still do about this? We weren't well informed and just sort of took what we could get from the neighbors because we didn't have any evidence that anyone knew the apartments were linked, though we know now that as shady as our landlord is, she had every idea and was just too lazy and cheap to disconnect the two apartments' electricity.
GRR! We froze for 3 months!
Hi Everyone, I hope someone can give us a bit of advice.
We moved into our apartment in a suburb outside of Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2007 and recently moved out at the end of November 2008. Our landlord was a bizarre lady who never got anything done correctly, lied repeatedly about when she would show up to fix things and used illegals to perform work that they weren't qualified to do (I had to use hand signals to indicate that our window unit was leaking condensation water into our apartment because it was tilted inwards rather than outwards. He didn't know air conditioners made water. Things like this..)
The apartment was one in 12 units in an old late 1800's-built mansion that was converted into apartments in the 1920s. It is a historical registry home. In saying that the windows were drafty, and the heating/ac units in them caused a significant amount of airflow directly into our apartment from the outside. After our first few months in the apartment, while we froze to death trying to save money yet still received bills of around 200 dollars for our small two bed / 1 bath that we NEVER ran the heat in at night etc., we found out through our own investigations that our upstairs neighbors were running off our electric bill. We started turning off our fuse in the basement that didn't power anything we knew of in our apartment and suddenly it would be turned back on. Finally we found out it was running all their appliances and lights, and probably they were using it for their own heater. When confronted our landlord did nothing about this initially, told us we were making a big deal out of nothing and that they had their own "outlet" that she had installed for them before they moved in in June. They were apparently running everything in their whole apartment off this one outlet (impossible, and what about the lights etc?) The electrician who was a friend of the landlord came out to fix it and told us we were making a big deal of nothing and that it was 'just pennies' that we'd been paying for their electric. The other tenants did some 'tests' and determined they owed us $80 or something for the past three months, which was pathetically low. The landlord did nothing to intervene, and I feel she should have covered our entire bill for those months since it was impossible to determine who owed what. They paid us the money and we just bit our tongues since we didn't know what else to do.
At around the same time we were shown a copy of our neighbor's spreadsheet where they kept track of their bills. They had paid $25 in October for gas and electric!!! No one pays $25! We paid nearly 200 in November! They had paid $12 one month in august!!
Then we found out from that that we were paying for their gas as well! They told us they thought our landlord was paying for our gas bill, because they were connected in our two apartments. We were never told this and had been paying $20/month approx for both our apartments' gas bills.
After we found this out we decided they would pay us 50% of the gas bill each month. We were not told that we would have to share our bills and found this unfair.
What is the proper protocol in this situation?
We just moved out and I had another question that is a bit more pertinent about our security deposit. I was just wondering if there was something we should have done differently or if this is something we could still do about this? We weren't well informed and just sort of took what we could get from the neighbors because we didn't have any evidence that anyone knew the apartments were linked, though we know now that as shady as our landlord is, she had every idea and was just too lazy and cheap to disconnect the two apartments' electricity.
GRR! We froze for 3 months!