The distric cooling company call centre.
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Imdaad’s Alan Millin on the joys of community service charges, district cooling call centres and some rather smelly house guests that could also be costly...
You have paid a community and service charge to the master developer of the development you live in.
The building is connected to a district cooling system and everything works well initially. You come home from work one day and your air conditioning has failed. No problem, you have paid your service charges so you call the master developer’s call centre to request service.
The technicians turn up at your door, you explain what’s wrong and they take a very quick look and tell you that your fan-coil units are fine; the problem lies with the chilled water system, but that is not part of their scope. You need to call the district cooling company. If this sounds familiar or not, you need to read on.
Now the trouble really starts. If you are lucky you might manage to speak to a warm, friendly human at the district cooling company who will tell you that there is nothing wrong with the district cooling system and that the problem must lie in your building somewhere.
You call the master developer’s call centre again and register another complaint. They send the same technicians that called earlier. And yes, they make the same diagnosis and inform you of their conclusion.
So if it’s not the FM provider and it’s not the district cooling company, who can help you? Ah yes, of course, it’s those nice people who look after the building’s chilled water system, not the district cooling company or the master developer’s appointed team after all.
But just who are these helpful people and how do you find and contact them? Remember that your air-conditioning is still off and you are getting more than a little upset now, especially as it’s summer.
Can you get contact details of the company you need from the master developer’s call centre? “No Sir, sorry we don’t have that information.”
And remember that if the district cooling company is billing on floor area rather than consumption, as we discussed in a previous article, you are still actually paying for chilled water. If we had meters at the unit level at least we would not be paying for a facility that we can’t use, and the district cooling company might take a more active interest in helping us.
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