Lightbulb moment: should landlords fine tenants who call them out with a problem they could sort themselves?

A colleague told me a friend of hers regularly fines her tenants for wasting her time with problems they could easily have dealt with themselves. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to do the same.

One morning a tenant reported that a light wasn’t working and asked me to send an electrician. She said she was sure the switch was broken because when she flicked it, nothing happened. To be fair, the switch was repaired only a few months ago, so it was probably a reasonable assumption that it had broken again.

However, you’d think she would have checked the bulb before contacting me, wouldn’t you? But she didn’t.

I arrived, popped a new one in and, hey presto, the light was working again.

The following lunchtime was spent sorting out a malfunctioning fridge after a tenant called to complain that there was a pool of water on the bottom shelf. I asked her if the drainage hole on the back inside wall of the fridge was blocked, which is a common problem and prevents condensation from inside the fridge escaping.

I then spent several minutes telling her where to find said drainage hole and when she did she insisted it was clear, so I decided to go and take a look. What did I find? A plug of ice covering the drainage hole. Ice removed, problem solved.

Before the week was out, I had a third tenant complaining that she had a fresh infestation of mice. I spent £200 on pest control a year or so ago to get rid of a previous infestation, which had almost certainly been caused by the tenant leaving food out on the worktop.

“You haven’t left any food out again, have you?” I asked, before calling pest control again. “Well yes, because I thought the mice had all gone,” she said.

I’ve had tenants ask for an engineer to be sent to repair an oven that was kicking out loads of smoke, when the cause was a grill pan full of dirty fat from their last fry-up. I’ve had to send an emergency plumber to fish out a loo roll that the tenants had tried to flush away, and I’ve wasted money on an emergency call-out to Dyno-Rod just to clear leaves from a blocked drain.

One group of students called me to say water was streaming down the kitchen wall and they had no idea where it was coming from. I had to explain to them that if you have several pans of food boiling on the hob and don’t switch on the extractor fan, you create an awful lot of condensation.

So yes, fines for wasting a landlord’s time might not be such a bad idea after all, then tenants might think twice before robbing me of my precious time. But collecting the fine might be another matter. I think they should just try reading the instruction manuals in every flat.