Rental Property HVAC in Wichita: A Landlord’s Guide to the Heating Season

In your own house you notice when the furnace runs longer than it used to, when one room is colder than the rest, or when a new noise starts. In a rental, nobody may notice, or a tenant may notice and say nothing until the house will not heat at all. Small problems have longer to become large ones, and they are most likely to surface when the system is working hardest: the coldest night or the hottest weekend of the year.

You also inherit whatever the last owner or installer left. On rental houses we have found equipment that was never set up for the house it went into, such as blower settings that were never set correctly at installation. A tenant has no way of knowing that, and neither do you until somebody looks.

None of that means a rental needs more equipment or more expensive equipment. It means the equipment needs looking at on your schedule rather than the tenant’s, and records that let you plan instead of react.

The Kansas Residential Landlord and Tenant Act sets out a landlord’s duties in K.S.A. 58-2553. Among them, a landlord must maintain the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning appliances they supply in good and safe working order and condition. The same section requires a landlord to supply reasonable heat, with an exception for heat generated by an installation within the tenant’s exclusive control and supplied by a direct utility connection. Whether that exception fits your building is a question for your lease and, if it matters, a lawyer. If you supplied the furnace, keeping it working is your job either way.

If a problem materially affects health and safety, a tenant can give you written notice of it. Under K.S.A. 58-2559, if you do not begin a good-faith effort to remedy it within fourteen days of receiving that notice, the tenant can end the lease on at least thirty days’ notice, and can also seek damages.

Access is covered too. K.S.A. 58-2557 lets a landlord enter to make necessary repairs at reasonable hours and after reasonable notice to the tenant, and without consent only in an extreme hazard involving the potential loss of life or severe property damage.

That is an HVAC contractor’s summary, not legal advice. The Act is short and worth reading, and your lease, your insurer or your lawyer may ask more of you than it does.

A vacant unit is the one time you have the equipment to yourself. There is no notice to give, no schedule to work around, no furniture against the furnace closet and no tenant waiting in a cold house. Turnover is when a problem costs least to find, and it is when you can see what the last tenant did or did not do.

Some of that you can check on the walk-through. The rest belongs to a technician, because the things that matter most on a furnace, such as combustion, venting, the safeties and the airflow, are measured rather than seen.

An empty house still needs heat. Pipes in an unheated house can freeze in a hard Kansas cold snap, and a burst pipe in a vacant unit can run for days before anybody finds it. Turning the furnace off to save gas between tenants is a poor trade against the cost of water damage.

Leave the heat on, set low rather than off, and read what your insurance policy says about vacant properties, because some policies set conditions for them.

Then make sure the house can tell you when something changes. A furnace that stops in an empty house does not make a phone call, but a thermostat that reports to your phone can. Many connected thermostats show the indoor temperature remotely and can send an alert when it moves outside a range you set. Whether one will work with the equipment in a particular house is worth checking before you buy it.

If the gas or electricity has been off and the furnace needs relighting or restarting, that is a job for a technician or the gas utility, not for whoever is painting the bedrooms.

The lease is where expectations about the equipment belong. Many landlords put filter changes on the tenant. If you do, say which size, who buys them and when they are changed, or supply them yourself and check them at every visit. The filter is the one part of the system a tenant handles routinely, so it is worth being specific about.

Ask tenants to keep the furnace closet clear and the return grilles uncovered, and to leave the equipment panels alone. In smaller and older houses the furnace often sits in a hall closet, and a closet is where storage ends up.

Most of all, ask them to tell you early. Give them one number to call, yours or your property manager’s, and decide in advance what happens next: who calls the contractor, and how much can be spent without asking you first.

The repair-or-replace question on a rental has the same floor as in your own home: a finding that makes a furnace unsafe is not something to weigh against how long you plan to hold the property. Above that floor, the sums work differently.

How long you expect to own the house matters more than the age on the data plate. A sound older furnace that has been looked after can be well worth repairing if you plan to sell in a few years, and we are glad to keep older equipment running where it is safe and sensible to do so. If you plan to hold the house for a long time, a replacement planned during a vacancy is far easier on everyone than one forced in January with a tenant waiting.

Count the costs that never appear on an invoice: a tenant without heat, a vacancy that runs longer because the unit is not ready, and the good tenant who does not renew after a second winter of breakdowns.

Owners with more than one address get the most from one contractor who knows every system they own. The history stays in one place, the technician arrives knowing what is there, and the findings come back in a form you can compare from one property to the next.

What you should expect from that is simple to state. You hear what is wrong at each address and what the repair will cost before any work starts, and you decide. You choose whether visits are arranged through you or directly with the tenant, with the notice your lease and Kansas law require. When new equipment goes in, the manufacturer warranty should be registered for you. That matters more on a rental than anywhere, because a warranty nobody registered is easy to lose track of across several properties and several changes of tenant.

We work on all makes and models, residential and commercial, across Wichita and South Central Kansas, from our base in Haysville. One house or a dozen, the approach is the same.

Whoever you hire, these are fair questions, and a contractor used to working with landlords will answer them without being pushed.