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Thanks Whale. They are my thoughts exactly!
Which leads to another issue regarding the Who’s Responsibility booklet.
As we note it states that smoke detectors are the responsibility of the Owner. I would like to point out that in my experience in the case of renters most of them do not report faults for fear that their rent might go up. I’m not having a go at renters as some Owners do the same thing.
What i’m trying to get across here is that the smoke detector can be inoperative for a year and not doing what it’s supposed to do for the safety of residents and the fault won’t be picked up until the next fire inspection.
If the problem was reported to the Managing Agent or EC when the fault happened, then it could be repaired promptly.
The EC and OC cannot have a problem fixed if they don’t know about the problem! Therefor I feel that more security and safety would be maintained if the responsibility became the onus of the OC. Should it be proven that the cause of the problem was caused by the resident, then perhaps they can be billed for the repair. We’re not talking about very much money.
We know about a few recent apartment fires, most notably Bankstown and we don’t want that happening to us.