What a Two-Family in Brooklyn Teaches You About Plumbing

Owning a two-family here is the classic Brooklyn wealth plan. Live in one unit, let the rent carry the mortgage, and the plan mostly works. What the plan never mentions is the plumbing. Most of the Plumbers Brooklyn keeps busy will tell you their steadiest repeat customers aren’t single-family homeowners at all. They’re small landlords, owners of the two- and three-family homes that make up half the borough’s housing stock, getting educated one service call at a time about how differently a building breaks when tenants live in it.

One Stack, Three Kitchens

A typical “row house” three-family has all kitchens connected to a common vertical drain stack. The grease from the upper floor flows down under the second floor, cools on the way, and accumulates where the stack changes to the horizontal position in the cellar. When the backup does occur, it appears at the lowest fixture, typically the ground-floor tenant’s sink or the cellar slop sink, far from the fixture causing the backup.

This geometry is what makes the solution for cleaning the drains different—treating a symptom by clearing one unit of a branch line. The full stack is treated in the building by snaking or jetting it down, horizontally through the cellar. If that’s the case, the owners of frame houses in Cypress Hills and East New York discover it at the expense of paying for the same “quick clog” three times in one year, each time pointing to a different apartment, none of which is ever correct.

The Water Bill Belongs to You

In New York, the landlords are responsible for water bills. The DEP charges the building, not the units,s and no tenant anywhere has ever been in a rush to flush on someone else’s money. A worn flapper will circulate a couple hundred gallons/day without making a peep. Compare the part to the cost of lunch. Its quarterly “bill” doesn’t.

The solution is straightforward and effective: ensure it is easy for tenants to report leaks, respond promptly enough to prevent tenants from constantly reporting leaks, and walk the building annually with someone who can hear a failing fill valve. It takes 10 minutes to add dye tablets to each tank. If the tablets return undamaged and the bill remains unchanged, the water has gone somewhere less refined: an underground service leak or a break in the slab, which can be determined more quickly by professional leak detection than the three additional billing cycles it would take to guess. Having the same done at Flatlands two-families is, however, akin to changing furnace filters—owners that don’t know about the leak from the bill, the costliest notification possible in history.

Three Families and Up Are on the Gas Clock

Local Law 152 requires most multifamily buildings to undergo a four-year gas piping inspection cycle. One- and two-family homes are exempt. A three-family is not, and the inspection has to be performed by a licensed master plumber or someone working under one, then filed with the Department of Buildings inside the deadline window for the community district. The inspection itself costs a few hundred dollars. Missing the filing runs a five-figure penalty, which is the city’s way of making sure nobody treats it as optional.

It is well worth the visit, as the inspection catches what it does catch. Cellar pipes that are corroded, pipes without supports, and illegal flexible connections running to dryers, shutoff valves that were painted so that the operator can no longer locate them. Gas work in this city is a licensed business, period—this is exactly what the law is for.

Tenant Clogs, Building Problems, and the Argument in Between

The “who-pays” question always comes up for every landlord. Tenants are responsible for wipes and grease in the trap, as well as for a toy fire truck. Building conditions include root intrusion, a bellied cellar line, and sixty years of pipe scale. It is impossible to win the argument without evidence, and the sewer camera can provide evidence. To resolve a security deposit dispute in only a few minutes, a dated video of a wad of “flushable” wipes is released.

In all standard forms, there are lease provisions on the use of drains. They only have value if there’s documentation, so everyone who has camera footage and invoices in a folder in Homecrest and Gowanus, and is prepared to show it, wins those conversations. The ones who don’t pay are charged,d and the pattern repeats with the next tenant.

A Heater Sized for a House, Feeding a Building

In many brownstone-built North Shore neighborhoods, such as Cobble Hill and Prospect Heights, the plumbing equation of one house still holds. The one 40-gallon tank that serves two full apartments dies young—and so do the people who are depending on it—and doesn’t reach the end of the month without having been beat up by the recovery rate, which is how fast the tank can reheat after a draw, which was never designed to serve two back-to-back morning showers and a dishwasher cycle. Before you can decide which brand of water heater is best for your multifamily, you need to figure out what size water heater to install. Sometimes, the solution may be a larger tank. Occasionally, it’s individual heaters per unit, and then each tenant’s use is their responsibility, which squelches a whole category of complaints.

It is the same with pressure. The rest of the pressure reaches the third floor of the units at the end of the century-old galvanized runs. Tenants refer to it as a “bad shower. Add a gauge to the hose bib and look at the pipe, and it turns into a repiping conversation.

The Retainer Mindset

Buildings reward relationships. The owners who benefit make a plumber perform like an accountant, one who knows the building before they have any problems. The annual walk-through, the heater flush, and the camera run are cheaper together than a tenant renting an apartment that is flooded in the cellar. Only one calculation is needed to validate that.

Brooklyn Plumber Co works with small landlords across the borough, from Cobble Hill to Cypress Hills, on everything from drain cleaning and leak detection to gas piping inspections and full repipes. The shop is at 2361 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11210, and (929) 605-5967 gets answered for scheduled maintenance and the 2 a.m. cellar call alike.