Landlord defends makeshift heating system without understanding laws

DEAR BARRY: I have two small rental units on rural acreage. One is an old school bus that I converted to an apartment and then rented to a young family. When the tenants complained about no heat, I devised an ingenious solution.

Next to the bus, I built a small metal shed with an old Franklin wood-burning stove inside. The way it works is simple: The stove heats the inside of the shed. Then an electric blower sends the heated air through an open window of the bus.

It worked perfectly until the tenant used the stove as an incinerator for his trash. Whatever he put in there caused an explosion, wrecking the stove, the shed, the bus and surrounding plants.

My tenant was badly burned and is now suing me. How can I convince him that it was his own foolishness, not my negligence, that caused his injuries?

— Earl

DEAR EARL: Your invention may have been built with the best of intentions, but that may not spare you in the eyes of the law. What matters is that you constructed a makeshift heating system, and it seems highly unlikely that it was installed with a building permit or official approval.

This violates a serious list of safety-related requirements. In effect, you built a potential gas chamber with explosive capability. Whether or not your tenant should have been burning trash does not diminish the fact that the heating system was not legal and should not have been built in the first place.

Owing to the serious damages, the final consequences could be more than financial liability. You could possibly be charged with criminal negligence.

What you built was a homemade forced-air furnace, utilizing a wood-burning stove as a heat exchanger. The main problem with this arrangement, aside from its illegality, is that a Franklin stove is not airtight. When the electric blower was operating, the air pressure inside the shed was lowered.

This could have caused combustion gases, including carbon monoxide, to be drawn through the loose fittings of the stove. Blowing such a mixture into the bus could have endangered the lives of your tenants. Rather than a summons, you could have been responsible for a news headline such as “Family Dies by Asphyxiation.”

As a landlord, you have an obligation to provide a home that complies with state and municipal requirements, including a heating system that is safe and legal, having been duly inspected and approved by the local building authority.

The use of a converted bus as a permanent habitation is probably a code violation in itself, especially if it is not equipped with an approved heat source. All in all, you created an unsafe and noncomplying habitation for your tenants.

In the course of their occupancy, misuse of an illegal heating system resulted in personal injury. By the time all of this is sorted out, your tenant may not be the only one who has gotten burned.

To write to Barry Stone, go to www. housedetective.com.

ACTION COAST PUBLISHING