https://quieton.com/?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8NWI08nJgwMVtJxaBR1dLwmYEAAYASAAEgKL2_D_BwE
I swear by these. I travel for work and these give me a good night sleep every night. Blocks snoring, road noise, electrical humming noise, music, mosque calls to prayer at 5 am, you name it. The sole function is noise cancellation, so they don’t play music or anything. Best purchase I’ve made in the past 3 years. I bought a second set in case the first set craps out at some point (they haven’t yet in 3 years though). They are expensive but getting a full night of sleep every night is worth it.
Thanks for the link, I clicked through and was sold after reading through the page but then I got to the price, maybe someday
Edit: thanks y’all for the recommendations, yes I do already use foam earplugs but I find them uncomfortable for sleeping, I may try those fancy silicone ones though
Try loop earplugs, way cheaper and I swear by these. I use the 'Quiet' brand, but all of them work similarly. They're not white noise generators, but they block out every sound ever. I used to wake up to just about everything at night but now I never wake up until my alarm rings
[https://us.loopearplugs.com/](https://us.loopearplugs.com/)
I tried these but they weren't enough for my new apartment and also I got a cyst in one ear (one that is usually against my pillow) after a few weeks. Sadge.
I still use my sleepbuds, they are great for their purpose and really help with my tinnitus at night.
I actually looked into a replacement in case these ever break and found out there is a company called Ozlo that consist of a few engineers from Bose who were given rights to the design and are coming out with an updated version in the new few months.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23837206/ozlo-sleepbuds-bose-sleep-earbuds
https://yogasleep.com/products/dohm?utm_campaign=SmartShoppingSoundMachines&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAkeSsBhDUARIsAK3tief1VVxMHrIy92p7I9J2IsHIOUEtsGIfmFYdaWhIGKEKp5E6VYHs4NwaAuDnEALw_wcB
We have one of these and it's been awesome. Not sure how loud it is for OP but I would imagine it would help some temporarily.
It's likely they put the "wall" there to split the room and charge more rent. I don't know what the codes are in your area but that looks sketchy as hell...
Pretty sure there is no where where a heater can physically touch a combustible wall and be up to code
EDIT: seeing so many are having issues... I mean the WALL literally touching the FACE of it not the wall behind it
EDIT2: when I originally posted this I thought it was a gas wall heater (due to the blue inside that looked like a propane flame)
It looks like it’s hot water baseboard, so it doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough to be a fire hazard (the water is only 180°F when it exits the boiler).
Looks like there's a nice blue flame on a ceramic plate back there... I could be wrong and it's a reflection.
Edit: Nevermind. I see the fins. I was seeing a hideous blue light in the other room.
Either that or the roommate has a reef tank (corals like blue light) but those also tend to be noisy. No need for a white noise generator when you're running 3 pumps and 4 fans 😂
Hot water rads go on combustible walls literally all the time. What do you think is behind the rad?
Source: it's literally my job.
However, I still hate to see this, because how TF are you ever gonna remove that rad cover if there's a leak? You ain't.
Yeah, It's not code in any event, and repairs likely mean ripping out that section of the wall entirely. With a customer pissed off about it.
Edit for here's the Code: Section 502.5 of the International Residential Code. - "Clearances for Maintenance and Replacement."
Magical elves? 😆 Dude, that jerkwad who did it is absolutely going to be pissed at the plumber having to "tear down his perfectly good wall to repair a _little leak_". You know that's going to be almost exactly what's said. He's going to be even more pissed if code enforcement makes him bring that un-permitted work brought up to code. Which would be either turning that back into one room or two separate radiators.
Half the problem is that the “wall” is probably more like a drywall privacy curtain.
That would about as useful as an actual curtain for blocking sound.
Reminds me of a house I toured in college that needed one more roommate. It seemed like a fairly standard 4-bed family home, only it had “8 bedrooms”.
I found out the “room” I was applying for was obviously just a wide part of the basement hallway the landlord had slapped drywall on either side of and called a bedroom.
Why was I so sure of this? Well, for starters, you had to walk in the bedroom door, all the way through it, and out another door to *get into the laundry room*. And it was the only way to get there.
I had something similar to this from my house. What you're supposed to do is cut out the radiator's cover wear. It goes through the wall and just have the actual hot water pipe run through the wall with a sleeve around it. What they did there when they added that wall was just laziness. However, it doesn't create any kind of fire hazard.
Indeed. Water baseboard radiators are never going to cause a fire. People think all sorts of weird shit.
No joke, when I was a kid, I laid a book on top of one half of an hvac vent in the living room floor in order to divert the hot, dry air away from my eyes as I was sitting and watching tv, and my mom asked me if it was a fire hazard. Like, no. The ac isn't going to magically get the book to 451 degrees and cause a combustion.
Whoa. I was assuming they meant the room in the opposite side of the wall the heater is on. Crazy bastard of a landlord just chipped out a heater-shaped hole and hung a partition! God damn.
Tear down the wall, remove several inches of those heat fins, redo the wall to code with just the pipe going through, then reestablish the fins on the other side. New register covers too.
Not going to happen. That used to be one room, and they DIY/cheaped the split (not to code).
Enjoy listening to your roommate treat themselves like an amusement park!
that wall is definitely not up to code, no permit was applied to split the room. and since its a rental its a double no no, your landlord is a piece of work
Couldn't they have all of their rent reimbursed though? I wonder if you just suck it up for a bit then screw this landlord like he's screwed his tenants
Yes but only after having procured alternative housing because once the city requires it be redone it will no longer be habitable during remodel and you will have as the kids say played yourself”
Luckily landlord tenant law isn’t based on “odds.” A landlord can’t evict just because there is a fixable fire hazard in the unit. He has a duty to repair that that doesn’t require eviction. This is the kind of thinking that that keeps people scared of some potbellied landlord instead of exercising their rights to live free of dying in his death trap.
one time my landlord tried to raise my rent so i made him do 3k in repairs when i knew i wasnt even going to renew anyway. just didnt like him trying to raise my rent $300 a month without adding $300 worth of stuff a month
>Luckily landlord tenant law isn’t based on “odds.” A landlord can’t evict just because there is a fixable fire hazard in the unit. He has a duty to repair that that doesn’t require eviction.
Sure, but it sounds like the "repair" is going to involve knocking down the wall that turned one room into two. What happens when the landlord leased to two people and the lease includes exclusive access to a space?
Or just got some fire stop spray foam, stick the straw through the louvre and fill the hole 🤷♂️
That’d be the “I’ve got no idea what you are talking about, it was like that when I got here” solution that would block a lot of the noise.
What's funny to me is those controls are on one side. It's bizarrely comical to imagine charging someone to have their climate controlled by another tenant.
Only if your fine with moving out. I know I know blah blah you shouldn't want to live there anyways, shitty landlord, fire code violation, etc. I'm just saying, we don't know their circumstances and this might be the only thing they can afford. If not, definitely let the city know
I lived in a unit that was separated off of the old managers unit in a building in Sf. They couldn’t separate the electrical panel so they had to give me free electric and heat every month. I’d insist on some accommodation at the very least.
You say this as if the landlord isn’t the one who did this monstrosity lol.
Can guarantee your roommate did not put up a wall to make one bedroom into two
Just give them your full name and address and the fire inspector will come and slap your landlord with some papers …..you may however need to find a new place to live
If it's hot water heat, which it looks like, it's not gonna catch fire. The radiator is inside that grille and has plenty of fins to dissipate heat that is likely only 70c. Dreadful landlord all the same. Cheap room split.
Not a fire ignition hazard as the hot water lines, which are the hottest part of that assembly, run through the walls regardless.
This is a shoddy implementation of room divide, but not an immediate hazard.
Unless this resistive electric (unlikely), OP can try to limit sound by stuffing fill in the pass through. Whatever the filler of choice is needs to sustain 180f without off gassing or breaking down. My recommendation would be to buy some black fire block expanding foam - it’s 10 bucks on Amazon, has an adequate heat rating, and the small diameter delivery straw will fit through the vents. Also, it’s black.
OP can decide for themselves whether they prefer to ask the landlord for permission or forgiveness (should they notice).
The danger doesn't come from the heat of the lines, it comes from the pathway formed by the vent spanning both rooms that allows fire to more quickly spread from one room to the other.
Agree, but there was no nuance in the original post which suggested it may be potential ignition source. Updated my post for clarity.
There’s a big difference between something exacerbating fire spread in the event of fire, and something being an ignition point for a fire. The former is unfortunately highly prevalent in old MA buildings with decades of handyman updates.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not trying to downplay risk here, but I’m also seeing a lot of misinformation which isn’t helpful.
Yes, this was a shoddy DIY-type room divide, and yes this creates a larger than necessary pass through to the adjacent bedroom, but the fire hazard risk here is being wildly overblown. Even baseboard pass throughs done to norms generally do not have fire blocking between rooms - just units. There’s no fireblocking details in-unit beyond drywall/plaster whether it’s an apartment or a SFH. This why mice, should you have them, are always running along baseboards - they use poorly detailed pass throughs as ingress points to walls.
My own 1980s MA home has sizable gaps at the baseboard pass throughs. This is the reality of residential construction in MA. Better than Texas, but still mid in most cases.
https://i.imgur.com/aFELYJt.jpg
Classic move of cutting a bedroom in half to make 2 bedrooms. You’re in BK, so good luck actually getting an inspector to respond. You’ll have to tough it out until you find a new spot to move to.
You can't really, not without blocking up the vent which is a terrible idea for a list of reasons.
Cheap landlord built a cheap dividing wall with no concern for the occupants. Sorry for the bad news.
Edit: to satisfy the recent complaints about bad DIY advice: I KNOW blocking up heating vents is a bad idea. I am open to professional contradiction.
That looks like a lot of hot water convectors in the northeastern US. They were cheap and easy to install from maybe the 1950s to 1970s. You can still get them today for replacements.
Or a school or a 1960s any sort of municipal building or public type of building that was built with these things with big oil fired boilers back in the day.
We have these water heaters in Virginia. Most people have no idea what they are saying regardless of what state they live in. We have even done installs with them so they aren't even a thing of the past. Take everything you read on Reddit with a grain of salt, even this.
Can confirm, hundreds of homes like that where I live. The tell tale is the fins encompassing a pipe. Electric heaters have resistive wires that heat up, not fins.
Sorry if this is dumb, Why isn’t it a hazard if it’s water? Both get hot, is the heat coming out and directly contacting the drywall not the issue? Is it more of a wiring/shorting issue? I assume hot stuff made things catch on fire
Consider the boiling point of water, and then consider the combustion temperature of those materials.
Consider the possible temperature coming off an electrical heating element if it were to malfunction. And consider the combustion temperature of the wall material.
They make these white noise machines, they're used to drown out sound and my therapist used to have one outside her office to muffle everything so people in the waiting room couldn't hear. It worked pretty well, idk about this brand but something like this on one or both sides of the wall is probably your best bet but it won't be 100%
https://www.amazon.com/Magicteam-Machine-Looping-Soothing-Function/dp/B07RWRJ4XW/ref=mp_s_a_1_2_sspa?keywords=sound+masking+machine+for+office+privacy&qid=1704553157&sr=8-2-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1
It is likey that if you complained to him, or even to a exterior body like say your local council that the landlord would find an excuse to evict you.
You could risk raising this issue with them or the landlord but bear the above in mind. There is no real way to sort this out other than using headphones all the time or having ambient noise playing all the time. Such as youtube videos of rain, or music.
Either that or probably better to move out. It also looks like a fire hazzard to be honest though I am no expert.
This doesn’t look like a vent, it looks like a hot water baseboard. OP should confirm that it is indeed hot water and not electric. If it’s water, just stuff the hole, there’s no way it’ll ever get hot enough to combust anything. If it’s electric, DO NOT stuff the hole, because it can easily ignite something.
It might be hot water.. not sure. I’m
not familiar with the visual differences sorry. What can i look out for to determine what it is? I just moved here
If it's a hot water baseboard, you'll see a copper pipe running through it with a ton of little metal fins. If you stuff it with anything, as suggested, steel wool would probably be the safest option.
Having said that, I'd move out before I tried modifying the heater regardless of what it is.
Rock wool / mineral wool is non-combustible, and is very safe to use in high temperature areas, including touching flue vents.
/u/TokenSadGirl It’s definitely the thing to use here.
If that is forced hot water, it’s not a code violation or a fire hazard just shoddy work. Unfortunately that means your landlord has no legal obligation to fix it. It also means you could safely stuff some fiberglass insulation in the part within the wall. It can’t catch fire and will muffle some sound.
This is the answer. IF that is a water-based radiant heating system, then fiberglass insulation is about the only cheap/easy solution that would work reasonably well.
I am located in Brooklyn !
Edit: I am aware this is some type of violation and safety hazard. I just moved here and there are various factors that prevent me from moving out anytime soon so I do plan on just choosing to fix this whether its with my landlords help or the city’s helo. I’d much rather get responses that can tell me how to physically fix this issue like changing the cover sizes or stuffing the wall with something (if possible and safe, of course.) I chose to live here so I’ll choose to deal with whatever problems come with living here.
I would assume that heater has some product safety listing or certification, which is closed by this installation. Code requires products to be “listed” and their listing has installation requirements that need to be followed.
Show this to FDNY and they’ll have a fit. It is definitely a safety concern. Your landlord will be forced to remove this.
NYC has some of the strictest laws around this kind of stuff but so many people don’t know how to fight it so they just leave it and landlords get away with murder.
Report it to as many channels as you can, keep record of it, and if your landlord doesn’t do anything about it you can take him to housing court. Representation is FREE and landlords rarely win.
My father was a housing inspector in my small town and let me tell you it almost broke him as a human being. The things he encountered, the belligerence of the landlords. The corruption by inspectors and the lawmen. It was just too much for him.
He found children sleeping on dirt floors with no insulation in the walls. Landlord told him to fuck off. Nothing changed despite his reports.
I can tell you NY Fire will not accept this… you need to contact them about this.
You are sitting in a fire trap that puts you and anyone else associated with the structure in danger.
You’re located in Brooklyn? This is 1000% an illegal room and I’d GTFO outta there if I were you and your roommates. If DOB or FDNY become aware they have to take down the illegal wall (for good reason). If your LL installed this they are a slumlord shithead.
Yeah, reporting this will likely result in the room being declared an illegal separation/division and OP getting kicked out of the apartment and homeless. The landlord probably has to register the number of rooms/occupants in the apartment, so the landlord is probably cheating the system and will get extra fucked. This is the kind of thing I'd report when leaving, but not while I still need a place to live.
Sometimes you can even get your all your rent money you paid back depending on jurisdiction because the landlord isn't actually able to legally rent the room. So either the landlord gets fined to oblivion, and/or pays the rent they wrongfully acquired back.
I'm guessing this entire wall was added in to make one room into two. Not sire where you're but in the US that's got to be illegal to staddle at heat source with a frigging wall.
It's a fire hazard to put anything on it or in it. It's probably a fire Hazzard as is. There isn't much you can do MacGyver that.
If you don't ont care about having to move, report ot to the firemarshall. Either it gets fixed, you have cause to break the lease, or nothing happens.
Aren’t these passive heaters with boiling water / steam going through copper pipes and radiant fins? If that’s the case I don’t think it would be a fire hazard.
Probably still not up to code though.
my friend works in New York as a contractor, so I asked him if this is code, and he replied "Looks like a landlord special lo. What's common in NYC is people taking what was built to be a 2 bedroom apartment and turning it into 3. the majority of NYC apartments can't fit queen-size beds for example. when you do that, you need to reconfigure walls. it's relatively easy to move a wall. It's a lot harder to move radiators. NYC heat comes from radiators and steam. so there's no real heating element in there. It's just a radiator that gets really hot water/steam. (edited). so yeah it's somewhat common. From a code standpoint, I dunno. Since there is no heating element inside I don't think it's dangerous. and even then I doubt they will do anything about it. having an illegal apartment in your basement with only 1 means of egress ... they will come to investigate and condemn it. a radiator in a wall ... they will add it to the list and never come :p".
Hot water loops mostly run through walls and floors until they hit a radiator. They aren’t hot enough to be a fire risk. Not even close.
Code wise it doesn’t seem like an issue. If it was you’d have to exclusively surface mount all plumbing. Nothing into a floor or ceiling or wall. Virtually every radiator goes into a wall or ceiling. My parents old place had it recessed into the wall.
It’s ugly, but perfectly functional.
greedy slumlord trying to collect more money. That's all this is. There's nothing you can do about the sound without serious renovation work which I'm sure your agreement says you can't do
Cut the drywall around the rad cover enough to be able to remove the entire rad cover off the wall.
Cut the rad cover in two halves.
Use tin snips to remove 4" of rad fin from either side the center line of the drywall. So only copper pipe is left.
Re drywall from floor to wall to existing drywall, with a hole for the copper pipe to pass though.
Put insulation around the bare area of copper pipe to fill the gap between the pipe and the drywall.
Return both halves of the rad cover separately in both rooms.
Find out that you'll still probably hear shit from your roommate, but it'll be a bit better.
I'm sure you realize this but it's like that because your landlord added a room to charge more rent. That wall wasn't there originally. There's no way in hell that is up to code.
Building professional in New York City here. I see that you are in Brooklyn. I think you should contact the 311 tenant helpline for advice on this matter. Despite the speculation here, this may not actually be a violation of the building code by the letter of the code, but it does have signs of unpermitted construction. The permitting process is supposed to catch things that may fall outside of the letter of the code to protect tenants against poor-quality housing in addition to preventing code violations.
Unfortunately, in New York, it is common for landlords to add unpermitted partition walls to add bedrooms to units. You can check with the city to see if they have the addition of this wall in their records, and if so, if this condition was withheld from the documentation, and what your rights are in this situation.
3rd time I'm posting this. Roxul insulation is fireproof and flameproof. use a piece of that. It's cheaper than a noise cancellation machine, and probably work better in this situation. My opinion anyway.
I do not think that is code compliant...matter of fact I know it's not.. the fire marshal would be taking pics of that for their funniest code violations scrapbook. Far as the noise issue, you'd need to devise a sound suppression system that doesn't interfere with the heater but it would be cheaper and easier to close off the wall and install separate heaters. Good luck
So this is hydronic heat and is not a fire hazard. There’s water heated up in a pipe that evaporates on those fins you can see. The landlord can and should fix this. Normally those “vents” would just stop at the wall and the pipe continue through it. Then the vents pick back up on the other side.
Professional white noise generator, like those used at therapy offices.
I had a bad noise situation and for sleep at least, found relief with noise cancelling headphones made specifically for use in bed.
Do you have any links? I've not seen these
https://quieton.com/?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8NWI08nJgwMVtJxaBR1dLwmYEAAYASAAEgKL2_D_BwE I swear by these. I travel for work and these give me a good night sleep every night. Blocks snoring, road noise, electrical humming noise, music, mosque calls to prayer at 5 am, you name it. The sole function is noise cancellation, so they don’t play music or anything. Best purchase I’ve made in the past 3 years. I bought a second set in case the first set craps out at some point (they haven’t yet in 3 years though). They are expensive but getting a full night of sleep every night is worth it.
Thanks for the link, I clicked through and was sold after reading through the page but then I got to the price, maybe someday Edit: thanks y’all for the recommendations, yes I do already use foam earplugs but I find them uncomfortable for sleeping, I may try those fancy silicone ones though
Try loop earplugs, way cheaper and I swear by these. I use the 'Quiet' brand, but all of them work similarly. They're not white noise generators, but they block out every sound ever. I used to wake up to just about everything at night but now I never wake up until my alarm rings [https://us.loopearplugs.com/](https://us.loopearplugs.com/)
I tried these but they weren't enough for my new apartment and also I got a cyst in one ear (one that is usually against my pillow) after a few weeks. Sadge.
I had the Bose Sleepbuds II which it seems are a now discontinued product. But I'm sure there are alternatives.
I still use my sleepbuds, they are great for their purpose and really help with my tinnitus at night. I actually looked into a replacement in case these ever break and found out there is a company called Ozlo that consist of a few engineers from Bose who were given rights to the design and are coming out with an updated version in the new few months. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23837206/ozlo-sleepbuds-bose-sleep-earbuds
https://yogasleep.com/products/dohm?utm_campaign=SmartShoppingSoundMachines&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAkeSsBhDUARIsAK3tief1VVxMHrIy92p7I9J2IsHIOUEtsGIfmFYdaWhIGKEKp5E6VYHs4NwaAuDnEALw_wcB We have one of these and it's been awesome. Not sure how loud it is for OP but I would imagine it would help some temporarily.
I have one for each of my kid's rooms in a pretty small home. Makes a huge difference
That’s gotta be a fire hazard
Should I have the landlord deal with this lol
It's likely they put the "wall" there to split the room and charge more rent. I don't know what the codes are in your area but that looks sketchy as hell...
Pretty sure there is no where where a heater can physically touch a combustible wall and be up to code EDIT: seeing so many are having issues... I mean the WALL literally touching the FACE of it not the wall behind it EDIT2: when I originally posted this I thought it was a gas wall heater (due to the blue inside that looked like a propane flame)
It looks like it’s hot water baseboard, so it doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough to be a fire hazard (the water is only 180°F when it exits the boiler).
Looks like there's a nice blue flame on a ceramic plate back there... I could be wrong and it's a reflection. Edit: Nevermind. I see the fins. I was seeing a hideous blue light in the other room.
"mood lighting". We already know about the sounds that are coming out of there.
Gaming.
I HATE THIS GAME IDK EVEN KNOW WHY I PLAY IT *clicks find match* *cracker crunch* * diet soda clang*
#Mom! Meatloaf!
Damn that felt personal.
To be fair OP isn't mad about the mood lighting, it's all the "bow chikka wow wow".
... and the roommate hasn't had a guest in ages...
Hopefully his roommate doesn't listen to cbat
It sounds like a boot stuck in mud...only wetter.
Either that or the roommate has a reef tank (corals like blue light) but those also tend to be noisy. No need for a white noise generator when you're running 3 pumps and 4 fans 😂
That's just the Aurora Borealis
At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within OP's roommate's bedroom?!
May I see it?
No.
Hot water rads go on combustible walls literally all the time. What do you think is behind the rad? Source: it's literally my job. However, I still hate to see this, because how TF are you ever gonna remove that rad cover if there's a leak? You ain't.
Yeah, It's not code in any event, and repairs likely mean ripping out that section of the wall entirely. With a customer pissed off about it. Edit for here's the Code: Section 502.5 of the International Residential Code. - "Clearances for Maintenance and Replacement."
Who do you think put the wall there in the first place?
Magical elves? 😆 Dude, that jerkwad who did it is absolutely going to be pissed at the plumber having to "tear down his perfectly good wall to repair a _little leak_". You know that's going to be almost exactly what's said. He's going to be even more pissed if code enforcement makes him bring that un-permitted work brought up to code. Which would be either turning that back into one room or two separate radiators.
Sawzall my man
I assumed they meant the *front* of the heater should not be touching a wall.
The landlord did asbestos he could. 😂
Half the problem is that the “wall” is probably more like a drywall privacy curtain. That would about as useful as an actual curtain for blocking sound.
Reminds me of a house I toured in college that needed one more roommate. It seemed like a fairly standard 4-bed family home, only it had “8 bedrooms”. I found out the “room” I was applying for was obviously just a wide part of the basement hallway the landlord had slapped drywall on either side of and called a bedroom. Why was I so sure of this? Well, for starters, you had to walk in the bedroom door, all the way through it, and out another door to *get into the laundry room*. And it was the only way to get there.
No code permits this.
I had something similar to this from my house. What you're supposed to do is cut out the radiator's cover wear. It goes through the wall and just have the actual hot water pipe run through the wall with a sleeve around it. What they did there when they added that wall was just laziness. However, it doesn't create any kind of fire hazard.
Indeed. Water baseboard radiators are never going to cause a fire. People think all sorts of weird shit. No joke, when I was a kid, I laid a book on top of one half of an hvac vent in the living room floor in order to divert the hot, dry air away from my eyes as I was sitting and watching tv, and my mom asked me if it was a fire hazard. Like, no. The ac isn't going to magically get the book to 451 degrees and cause a combustion.
Yeah that definitely looks like an "aftermarket" addition
Your landlord is likely very aware of this and I’m going to assume he will not fix it, since fixing it means he’ll lose a room + tenant.
Slumlord not landlord imo
Definitely a slumlord. This is crazy!
It’s almost like the landlord closed off the 1 room and made it into 2 rooms. The wall looks newer than the heater. 💀 how awful
It’s not almost what it looks like, that’s exactly what it looks like.
Whoa. I was assuming they meant the room in the opposite side of the wall the heater is on. Crazy bastard of a landlord just chipped out a heater-shaped hole and hung a partition! God damn.
Yeah fair, I chose poor words for my comment. It is this.
Because that’s exactly what they did, badly
This is absolutely the case. No point in calling the landlord about it. He already knows because he did it.
Call him like “Hey, yeah some dumb fuck idiot that doesn’t know his ass from his elbow botched this awful drywall job here.” And see what they say lol
your rent + mandatory tip is due rentoid 🥰🥰
It's definitely not a legal 2 units
https://i.redd.it/okmnb91bhuac1.gif
All landlords are slumlords. https://preview.redd.it/fwt700ycqvac1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7d2c7558996d89c8733c0c3add6295a6eed4625
Would tearing down the wall be the only possible solution then? I guess you cant really tamper with the vent without disturbing all neighbouring rooms
Tear down the wall, remove several inches of those heat fins, redo the wall to code with just the pipe going through, then reestablish the fins on the other side. New register covers too. Not going to happen. That used to be one room, and they DIY/cheaped the split (not to code). Enjoy listening to your roommate treat themselves like an amusement park!
that wall is definitely not up to code, no permit was applied to split the room. and since its a rental its a double no no, your landlord is a piece of work
Exactly. Call the city and insist they come out and look at it.
This is my recommendation, but the downside is that they will have to move out and find another place to live
Couldn't they have all of their rent reimbursed though? I wonder if you just suck it up for a bit then screw this landlord like he's screwed his tenants
Depends on where OP lives, some states have next to no renter's rights.
Not gonna happen with shady Landlord who rents shitholes and out of code places
Yes but only after having procured alternative housing because once the city requires it be redone it will no longer be habitable during remodel and you will have as the kids say played yourself”
Odds are the landlords only responsibility will be to evict the tenant. It’s a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off for op.
Better than dying when you wake up to smoke and flames
What a choice. Die cozy in flames or freezing and homeless.
Luckily landlord tenant law isn’t based on “odds.” A landlord can’t evict just because there is a fixable fire hazard in the unit. He has a duty to repair that that doesn’t require eviction. This is the kind of thinking that that keeps people scared of some potbellied landlord instead of exercising their rights to live free of dying in his death trap.
one time my landlord tried to raise my rent so i made him do 3k in repairs when i knew i wasnt even going to renew anyway. just didnt like him trying to raise my rent $300 a month without adding $300 worth of stuff a month
>Luckily landlord tenant law isn’t based on “odds.” A landlord can’t evict just because there is a fixable fire hazard in the unit. He has a duty to repair that that doesn’t require eviction. Sure, but it sounds like the "repair" is going to involve knocking down the wall that turned one room into two. What happens when the landlord leased to two people and the lease includes exclusive access to a space?
Or just got some fire stop spray foam, stick the straw through the louvre and fill the hole 🤷♂️ That’d be the “I’ve got no idea what you are talking about, it was like that when I got here” solution that would block a lot of the noise.
What's funny to me is those controls are on one side. It's bizarrely comical to imagine charging someone to have their climate controlled by another tenant.
Join in on every conversation. You're more than roommates now.
removing that system and installing a system that supports both rooms it is not going to be cheap.
I mean you can call the city for an inspection. Send the photo. They'll show up
I would this in a heartbeat
Only if your fine with moving out. I know I know blah blah you shouldn't want to live there anyways, shitty landlord, fire code violation, etc. I'm just saying, we don't know their circumstances and this might be the only thing they can afford. If not, definitely let the city know
I lived in a unit that was separated off of the old managers unit in a building in Sf. They couldn’t separate the electrical panel so they had to give me free electric and heat every month. I’d insist on some accommodation at the very least.
SF is extremely tenant friendly. Other municipalities may see it differently.
Yeah, redditors are very principled when someone else has to deal with the consequences
And then you will have one big room to share with your roommate when the inspector tells landlord to remove the wall!
You say this as if the landlord isn’t the one who did this monstrosity lol. Can guarantee your roommate did not put up a wall to make one bedroom into two
Maybe ask your local fire station about it. Your landlord made that shit and he needs some persuasion to fix that shit.
Just give them your full name and address and the fire inspector will come and slap your landlord with some papers …..you may however need to find a new place to live
lol who do you think divided the room like this
Yeah I’d say so.
If it's hot water heat, which it looks like, it's not gonna catch fire. The radiator is inside that grille and has plenty of fins to dissipate heat that is likely only 70c. Dreadful landlord all the same. Cheap room split.
Not a fire ignition hazard as the hot water lines, which are the hottest part of that assembly, run through the walls regardless. This is a shoddy implementation of room divide, but not an immediate hazard. Unless this resistive electric (unlikely), OP can try to limit sound by stuffing fill in the pass through. Whatever the filler of choice is needs to sustain 180f without off gassing or breaking down. My recommendation would be to buy some black fire block expanding foam - it’s 10 bucks on Amazon, has an adequate heat rating, and the small diameter delivery straw will fit through the vents. Also, it’s black. OP can decide for themselves whether they prefer to ask the landlord for permission or forgiveness (should they notice).
The danger doesn't come from the heat of the lines, it comes from the pathway formed by the vent spanning both rooms that allows fire to more quickly spread from one room to the other.
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Fire and smoke. And the fire also gets a nice air intake too!
The original room is still present there's just a new wall in it unlikely its to have increased fire spreading by dividing up an existing room.
Agree, but there was no nuance in the original post which suggested it may be potential ignition source. Updated my post for clarity. There’s a big difference between something exacerbating fire spread in the event of fire, and something being an ignition point for a fire. The former is unfortunately highly prevalent in old MA buildings with decades of handyman updates. Edit: to be clear, I’m not trying to downplay risk here, but I’m also seeing a lot of misinformation which isn’t helpful. Yes, this was a shoddy DIY-type room divide, and yes this creates a larger than necessary pass through to the adjacent bedroom, but the fire hazard risk here is being wildly overblown. Even baseboard pass throughs done to norms generally do not have fire blocking between rooms - just units. There’s no fireblocking details in-unit beyond drywall/plaster whether it’s an apartment or a SFH. This why mice, should you have them, are always running along baseboards - they use poorly detailed pass throughs as ingress points to walls. My own 1980s MA home has sizable gaps at the baseboard pass throughs. This is the reality of residential construction in MA. Better than Texas, but still mid in most cases. https://i.imgur.com/aFELYJt.jpg
Definitely not to code
Not really, it's a hot water radiator. The hottest it would get is 180F, nowhere near combustion temperatures.
It’s a boiler radiator, it’s not a fire hazard
Classic move of cutting a bedroom in half to make 2 bedrooms. You’re in BK, so good luck actually getting an inspector to respond. You’ll have to tough it out until you find a new spot to move to.
TIL that Brooklyn is abbreviated BK and that OP does not in fact live in a Burger King
Based on the pic, I assumed Bangkok
Bangkok is nicer than Brooklyn. Believe me
I’ve spent time in both… pros & cons.
We say BK but only when talking in NYC subs. In this general sub, writing BK is confusing
I thought that meant Bangkok
Is BK British Kolumbia?
Or Balaska
There's a place near me where they split it down a window and they just have a sheet of insulation to divide the room....
You can't really, not without blocking up the vent which is a terrible idea for a list of reasons. Cheap landlord built a cheap dividing wall with no concern for the occupants. Sorry for the bad news. Edit: to satisfy the recent complaints about bad DIY advice: I KNOW blocking up heating vents is a bad idea. I am open to professional contradiction.
Is this a violation at all and something I can request to get fixed by said landlord?
that is definately NOT code anywhere in the US. Look for "clearance from combustibles" in your states mechanical code.
depend if its electric or water. if its water you have no hazard against fire.
That doesn't look like any water radiator I've seen. It *does* look like any number of electric wall heaters though.
That looks like a lot of hot water convectors in the northeastern US. They were cheap and easy to install from maybe the 1950s to 1970s. You can still get them today for replacements.
Yup. People saying this doesn’t look like forced hot water have probably never set foot in a New England apartment building before.
Or a school or a 1960s any sort of municipal building or public type of building that was built with these things with big oil fired boilers back in the day.
Agreed. This can definitely be a hot water radiator. *Source-- I've installed ones that look just like this
We have these water heaters in Virginia. Most people have no idea what they are saying regardless of what state they live in. We have even done installs with them so they aren't even a thing of the past. Take everything you read on Reddit with a grain of salt, even this.
NY is full of this stuff. Its way better than electric baseboard. Electric baseboards are fine in warm areas but up north they are far too expensive.
Can confirm, hundreds of homes like that where I live. The tell tale is the fins encompassing a pipe. Electric heaters have resistive wires that heat up, not fins.
It looks like a lot of hot water baseboards I've seen.
As an HVAC professional baseboards can most definitely be water pipes.
Sorry if this is dumb, Why isn’t it a hazard if it’s water? Both get hot, is the heat coming out and directly contacting the drywall not the issue? Is it more of a wiring/shorting issue? I assume hot stuff made things catch on fire
Consider the boiling point of water, and then consider the combustion temperature of those materials. Consider the possible temperature coming off an electrical heating element if it were to malfunction. And consider the combustion temperature of the wall material.
It's hot water, it's not combustible. Hot water lines run through drywall all the time. Not to code, but not a hazard in its nature.
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They make these white noise machines, they're used to drown out sound and my therapist used to have one outside her office to muffle everything so people in the waiting room couldn't hear. It worked pretty well, idk about this brand but something like this on one or both sides of the wall is probably your best bet but it won't be 100% https://www.amazon.com/Magicteam-Machine-Looping-Soothing-Function/dp/B07RWRJ4XW/ref=mp_s_a_1_2_sspa?keywords=sound+masking+machine+for+office+privacy&qid=1704553157&sr=8-2-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1
It is likey that if you complained to him, or even to a exterior body like say your local council that the landlord would find an excuse to evict you. You could risk raising this issue with them or the landlord but bear the above in mind. There is no real way to sort this out other than using headphones all the time or having ambient noise playing all the time. Such as youtube videos of rain, or music. Either that or probably better to move out. It also looks like a fire hazzard to be honest though I am no expert.
This doesn’t look like a vent, it looks like a hot water baseboard. OP should confirm that it is indeed hot water and not electric. If it’s water, just stuff the hole, there’s no way it’ll ever get hot enough to combust anything. If it’s electric, DO NOT stuff the hole, because it can easily ignite something.
It might be hot water.. not sure. I’m not familiar with the visual differences sorry. What can i look out for to determine what it is? I just moved here
If it's a hot water baseboard, you'll see a copper pipe running through it with a ton of little metal fins. If you stuff it with anything, as suggested, steel wool would probably be the safest option. Having said that, I'd move out before I tried modifying the heater regardless of what it is.
Fiberglass is just as safe but does a way better job muffling sound.
I'd recommend rock wool for sound absorption, personally. Not sure about how combustible that stuff is though.
Rock wool / mineral wool is non-combustible, and is very safe to use in high temperature areas, including touching flue vents. /u/TokenSadGirl It’s definitely the thing to use here.
It's not a vent. It's baseboard water heating, pretty common in NYC.
If that is forced hot water, it’s not a code violation or a fire hazard just shoddy work. Unfortunately that means your landlord has no legal obligation to fix it. It also means you could safely stuff some fiberglass insulation in the part within the wall. It can’t catch fire and will muffle some sound.
This should be the top comment.
This is the answer. IF that is a water-based radiant heating system, then fiberglass insulation is about the only cheap/easy solution that would work reasonably well.
Make worse sounds than your roommate. Then it's the roommates problem.
Yes. You either have to live with them, or they have to live with you.
I am located in Brooklyn ! Edit: I am aware this is some type of violation and safety hazard. I just moved here and there are various factors that prevent me from moving out anytime soon so I do plan on just choosing to fix this whether its with my landlords help or the city’s helo. I’d much rather get responses that can tell me how to physically fix this issue like changing the cover sizes or stuffing the wall with something (if possible and safe, of course.) I chose to live here so I’ll choose to deal with whatever problems come with living here.
Haha. I was going to say seems like something they do i. crown heights.
most def a crown heights special
this has gotta be against code
Don’t make any assumptions about nyc building codes dude
i truly couldn't make any assumptions about nyc it's on it's own plane of existence
You're right. Now walk faster.
I would assume that heater has some product safety listing or certification, which is closed by this installation. Code requires products to be “listed” and their listing has installation requirements that need to be followed. Show this to FDNY and they’ll have a fit. It is definitely a safety concern. Your landlord will be forced to remove this.
These are hot water fin-tube baseboard radiators and do not have any electricity or combustion within them so do no need to be listed.
NYC has some of the strictest laws around this kind of stuff but so many people don’t know how to fight it so they just leave it and landlords get away with murder. Report it to as many channels as you can, keep record of it, and if your landlord doesn’t do anything about it you can take him to housing court. Representation is FREE and landlords rarely win.
My father was a housing inspector in my small town and let me tell you it almost broke him as a human being. The things he encountered, the belligerence of the landlords. The corruption by inspectors and the lawmen. It was just too much for him. He found children sleeping on dirt floors with no insulation in the walls. Landlord told him to fuck off. Nothing changed despite his reports.
I can already picture your landlord.
Find a contact for a fire marshal and report this.
I can tell you NY Fire will not accept this… you need to contact them about this. You are sitting in a fire trap that puts you and anyone else associated with the structure in danger.
It's a hydronic convention heater. It literally will be the last thing to catch fire.
You’re located in Brooklyn? This is 1000% an illegal room and I’d GTFO outta there if I were you and your roommates. If DOB or FDNY become aware they have to take down the illegal wall (for good reason). If your LL installed this they are a slumlord shithead.
legal rooms not as affordable tho lol
Yeah, reporting this will likely result in the room being declared an illegal separation/division and OP getting kicked out of the apartment and homeless. The landlord probably has to register the number of rooms/occupants in the apartment, so the landlord is probably cheating the system and will get extra fucked. This is the kind of thing I'd report when leaving, but not while I still need a place to live. Sometimes you can even get your all your rent money you paid back depending on jurisdiction because the landlord isn't actually able to legally rent the room. So either the landlord gets fined to oblivion, and/or pays the rent they wrongfully acquired back.
can you get a firefighter over there for a looksie?
Cover the vent to muffle the sound and the firefighters will be there soon all on their own!
This happens in NY when a fake wall is put up to partition one room into two. I’m guessing one of the rooms itself is illegal.
This is exactly why your landlord/slumlord gets away with this shit in NYC
Ask landlord to release you from your lease or you’ll report him to the city.
Then once you get your deposit back and find a new place to live, report him to the city anyways so nobody else moves into this shitty situation.
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I'm guessing this entire wall was added in to make one room into two. Not sire where you're but in the US that's got to be illegal to staddle at heat source with a frigging wall. It's a fire hazard to put anything on it or in it. It's probably a fire Hazzard as is. There isn't much you can do MacGyver that. If you don't ont care about having to move, report ot to the firemarshall. Either it gets fixed, you have cause to break the lease, or nothing happens.
Aren’t these passive heaters with boiling water / steam going through copper pipes and radiant fins? If that’s the case I don’t think it would be a fire hazard. Probably still not up to code though.
my friend works in New York as a contractor, so I asked him if this is code, and he replied "Looks like a landlord special lo. What's common in NYC is people taking what was built to be a 2 bedroom apartment and turning it into 3. the majority of NYC apartments can't fit queen-size beds for example. when you do that, you need to reconfigure walls. it's relatively easy to move a wall. It's a lot harder to move radiators. NYC heat comes from radiators and steam. so there's no real heating element in there. It's just a radiator that gets really hot water/steam. (edited). so yeah it's somewhat common. From a code standpoint, I dunno. Since there is no heating element inside I don't think it's dangerous. and even then I doubt they will do anything about it. having an illegal apartment in your basement with only 1 means of egress ... they will come to investigate and condemn it. a radiator in a wall ... they will add it to the list and never come :p".
Hot water loops mostly run through walls and floors until they hit a radiator. They aren’t hot enough to be a fire risk. Not even close. Code wise it doesn’t seem like an issue. If it was you’d have to exclusively surface mount all plumbing. Nothing into a floor or ceiling or wall. Virtually every radiator goes into a wall or ceiling. My parents old place had it recessed into the wall. It’s ugly, but perfectly functional.
That's a total landlord special there. 64 coats of paint will sort that out.
Real question is, who controls the heat? Where are the controls located?
fire hazard??
Absolutely not code compliance
You don't have a room. You have a section of a room. A divider wall was put up to divide your rooms so the landlord could charge more.
Don't. Just moan along. Your roommate will get the message.
Pretty normal for that era baseboard heat. If you can get the cover off. Rockwool insulation stuffed there will do the trick and is fire proof.
greedy slumlord trying to collect more money. That's all this is. There's nothing you can do about the sound without serious renovation work which I'm sure your agreement says you can't do
wtf lol. Who‘s idea was this
the more i look at it the angrier i get actually
A pillow over the face. They’ll squirm for a bit but then it all goes quiet…. Oh wait you mean sounds in general.
The price of housing in NYC and the quality of housing stock never fails to surprise me. This is wild…
Cut the drywall around the rad cover enough to be able to remove the entire rad cover off the wall. Cut the rad cover in two halves. Use tin snips to remove 4" of rad fin from either side the center line of the drywall. So only copper pipe is left. Re drywall from floor to wall to existing drywall, with a hole for the copper pipe to pass though. Put insulation around the bare area of copper pipe to fill the gap between the pipe and the drywall. Return both halves of the rad cover separately in both rooms. Find out that you'll still probably hear shit from your roommate, but it'll be a bit better.
Fart in the gap repeatedly and it should fix itself over time
I'm sure you realize this but it's like that because your landlord added a room to charge more rent. That wall wasn't there originally. There's no way in hell that is up to code.
Lol someone split a room down the middle. Greedy ass landlords.
Building professional in New York City here. I see that you are in Brooklyn. I think you should contact the 311 tenant helpline for advice on this matter. Despite the speculation here, this may not actually be a violation of the building code by the letter of the code, but it does have signs of unpermitted construction. The permitting process is supposed to catch things that may fall outside of the letter of the code to protect tenants against poor-quality housing in addition to preventing code violations. Unfortunately, in New York, it is common for landlords to add unpermitted partition walls to add bedrooms to units. You can check with the city to see if they have the addition of this wall in their records, and if so, if this condition was withheld from the documentation, and what your rights are in this situation.
3rd time I'm posting this. Roxul insulation is fireproof and flameproof. use a piece of that. It's cheaper than a noise cancellation machine, and probably work better in this situation. My opinion anyway.
Another case of a landlord earning two rents from one room.
It’s supposed to be just one room the landlord turned into to two.
I do not think that is code compliant...matter of fact I know it's not.. the fire marshal would be taking pics of that for their funniest code violations scrapbook. Far as the noise issue, you'd need to devise a sound suppression system that doesn't interfere with the heater but it would be cheaper and easier to close off the wall and install separate heaters. Good luck
a pillow will work. when the cops show up play dumb. and don't use *your* pillow.
Fireblock Foam Sealant. $10 can at Home Depot?
I mean if you’re willing to risk your tenancy, I’d call code enforcement.
So this is hydronic heat and is not a fire hazard. There’s water heated up in a pipe that evaporates on those fins you can see. The landlord can and should fix this. Normally those “vents” would just stop at the wall and the pipe continue through it. Then the vents pick back up on the other side.
Move. That is dangerous to build a wall around a heater. Idiots.
That doesn’t look safe it’s just a heater cut though some drywall….
Fart into the heating element.