taps – the information provided by the Department of Fair Trading is by necessity generalist, however there are some specific factors at your Plan that come into play.
The most significant one of those is that even though the Owners Corporation (O/C) was at some stage aware that a previous Owner had altered and/or added to the common water supply, it not only did nothing about that such as by at that time making that Owner and subsequent ones of that Lot responsible for the on-going maintenance and repair of those illegal works, its now undertaken the replacement of that entire section of the common water supply and now seeks a reimbursement of its costs to do that from the current Lot Owner.
Those unchallenged works by the original Owner means that the section of the common water supply that they altered and/or added to has itself become part of the common property, despite the fact that the garden tap is within the cubic air space of the Lot involved.
Your O/C could seek a reimbursement from the current Lot Owner for its costs to replace the garden tap ($20), but then you mentioned that it wasn’t faulty. So I’d suggest that your O/C just treats the $100s spent on plumbing repairs as the costs of a lesson cheaply learnt; that being to ensure that any works by Lot Owners that result in a change to the common property are consented to in advance in accordance with Sect 65A of the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act (1996) and that for minor works, it at least obtains a written undertaking from the Lot Owner accepting responsibility for the on-going maintenance and repair of whatever it is that comprises their works.
Just be thankful that the change to the common property in this instance comprised a minor addition to a common water supply and not an attached awing or a split-system aircon. fitted to common wall, because in the same circumstances and in the absence of proper consent with the original Owner (who seeks to undertake the works) the O/C would be responsible for those also.
0910 PS – just read KWP’s post, and yes it’s another point-of-view, but note that I’ve differentiated (above) between the previous Lot Owner who presumably undertook the illegal works and the current Lot Owner who’s now benefiting from those, because the O/C would be hard-pressed in my opinion to justify legally, morally, or financially, the removal of a minor extension to a common water supply that it knew about, which its just reinstated, and which the current beneficiary didn’t install. As I said, a lesson cheaply learnt.