Could you go 11 weeks without hot water? Some tenants have had to in a Toronto condo

A group of renters in a downtown Toronto condo tower are upset at what they say are intermittent hot water outages, with one tenant reporting she has now gone 78 days without full hot water service.

Others say they've gone without hot water for weeks at a time.

Imran Muhammed has been living with his wife and three kids in a rented two-bedroom unit at 25 Grenville St. for the past year and is among those affected.

"It was a very bad response, to be honest. I did not have any option at the time to move out of the building. But the response, the way they managed this problem, was horrible."

The condo board hasn't yet responded to requests for comment from CBC Toronto. But in a letter to tenants Monday, the property management said final repairs have been approved by the condo board.

In the letter, the condo board says it has approved the cost of replacing the problem pipes and will update residents once the work has been scheduled, but provides no timeline on completion. The letter also doesn't acknowledge how long the problems have been going on.

The problem appears to be related to water pipes that need to be replaced in the building, which residents say was built in the early 1990s. 

Several residents told CBC Toronto they started having problems accessing hot water in their units in spring.

One of the most severely affected tenants was a 24 year-old-woman, Morgan, who's on the autism spectrum and who has now had no regular hot water service for 78 days, she says. CBC Toronto agreed not to use her last name because she doesn't want condo management or her boss to know about her condition.

"It was super stressful," Morgan said. "I need a lot of routine and predictability. It was not a nice situation at all."

Morgan said although her bathroom hot water was restored on June 20 — after 48 days without it — the work crew that opened up her bathroom wall has yet to repair it.

But while the affected units now appear to have hot water in their bathrooms, residents such as Morgan still await hot water in their kitchens — a problem the building's property management acknowledged in its letter to residents.

City staff should be insisting that condo management restores full water service immediately, says Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations.

"The city has a variety of powers here. They have the power of persuasion, but they also have the power of remedial action — the city can actually step in and do the repairs and put it on the landlord's bill," he said.