Landlord’s Guide To Providing Safe Water For Tenants

There’s a diverse nature to the duties of a landlord. A landlord is responsible for different provisions on a property, from ensuring tenants’ security to adequate monitoring of the house. That’s why, between the landlord and the tenant, there are obligations that landlords should fulfill to make their tenants’ stays itch-free.

There is often a warranty of habitability that landlords must uphold for their tenants. Ensuring your tenant’s rental is livable, secure, and clean will help you do this. As a landlord, you must also provide a sufficient, reliable, clean, accessible, and safe drinking water supply for your tenants.

If you’re a landlord thinking of how to provide this resource for your renters, this article is for you. Read along as we examine a landlord’s guide to providing safe water for tenants and the types of water treatment available.

Landlord’s Responsibility to Provide Safe Drinking Water for Tenants

Being a landlord counts as owning a business. Your rental is an asset, and your tenants are your clients. To ensure your investments are protected, you must take care of your assets. A landlord can stay on the right path by doing appropriate maintenance, repairs, payments, and accounting. Tenants have an inherent entitlement to a warranty of habitability regardless of a lease. Every renter has the right to a clean and safe rental. Therefore, the tenant must have access to safe drinking water. You can also hire a trusted property management team to ensure your rental property compliance. 

Landlords are required to follow specific procedures to test their water for contaminants. To ensure that your tenants and guests drink safe, healthy water, it is essential to do residential water quality testing. For instance, a Water Quality Indicator (WQI) test analyses the number of microorganisms in drinking water. However, WQIs don’t always result in illness; it’s crucial to remember that. But they could also indicate that the water contains sewage or germs.

Examples of these Water Quality indicators are:

• Fecal Coliforms

Fecal coliform bacteria are a specific kind of total coliform. Millions of fecal coliforms, including E. coli, can be found in the feces of humans and animals.

• The pH level of the water

You can determine how basic or acidic your water is by checking its pH level. The appearance and taste of your water can vary depending on the pH level. 

If the stories are very high or very low, it could harm your pipes, cause heavy metals to escape from the lines, and result in sickness. However, you can also read up on maintaining household water quality to provide your home with safe drinking water.

What is House Bill 1069?

In April 2021, House Bill 1096 was approved by the Maryland legislature. It offers tenants who rely on well water protection for their drinking water. But unfortunately, private wells aren’t subject to the same EPA safety regulations, monitoring, and testing as public water systems. 

Before the Maryland legislature passed the bill, tenants occupying rental properties might have been at risk of water contamination. After all, tenants do not influence the quality of their water supply. Furthermore, state regulations may differ; not all offer protection to tenants who rely on well water. One of the five states with protections was Maryland.

HB1069 was passed to safeguard residents and guarantee that all renters can access clean drinking water. As a result, landlords are in charge of checking and monitoring the quality of their healthy water.

Types of Treatment Available

There is no foolproof way to keep impurities out of your well water. To safeguard against harmful contaminants and enhance the quality of your drinking water, there are a few methods you may use to treat your water. They include:

• Filtration systems

The stage of filtration is crucial in the water treatment process. Most frequently, household water treatment systems use filtration to eliminate sediment, iron, manganese, or sulfur particles. 

Additionally, filtration can help to clean the water of some microorganisms. In mechanical filtration devices, water moves through a medium, such as cloth or sand. On the medium’s surface or within the medium, particles get stuck. The size of the pores, or the distance between media granules or fibers, controls the size of the particles that a filter is capable of filtering out.

• Water softeners

Hard water is one of the most common and destructive issues, and a water softener solves it. A water softener is a tool that reduces the hardness of the water. The ions that cause hardness in the water, such as calcium and magnesium ions, are often replaced by sodium or potassium ions in a water softener.

Your pipes get clogged and lose water pressure due to scale buildup. Due to scale, dishwashers, coffee makers, and ice makers all experience much shorter life spans. In addition, hard water ruins hot water appliances. More calcium and magnesium will solidify and harden inside your water heater into solid deposits as the water temperature rises.

• Disinfection

Disinfection can be accomplished with either physical or chemical disinfectants. Through the disinfection method, pathogenic bacteria can be eliminated or rendered inactive. The agents also remove organic contaminants in water that act as nourishment or habitat for microbes.

Disinfectants should not just eradicate pathogens. They must also have a residual impact, which implies that they continue to function in the water even after disinfection. A disinfectant can stop pathogenic bacteria from flourishing in the plumbing after disinfection.

• Distillation

The distillation process involves boiling contaminated water, collecting the steam, and condensing it in a different container while leaving most of the solid impurities behind.

In this process, untreated water is heated until it reaches its comparatively low boiling point and starts to evaporate. This temperature is then maintained in the water to keep the water vaporizing while preventing the vaporization of other substances. 

Additionally, by adopting this method, any minute pathogens can be separated from the water molecules. This vapor is then directed into a condenser after the water has evaporated. The water cools when removed from the heat source, returns to a liquid state, and then flows into a receiving container.

Final thoughts

To ensure the health, safety, and general welfare of your tenants and the general public, you have a responsibility as a landlord to offer comfortable apartments and common areas for the tenancy.

Aside from a water sanitation emergency linked to a primary provider, landlords are in charge of most aspects of the delivery of safe water inside a residential property. Therefore, it’s essential to test your water regularly and show your tenants the results to guarantee happy and healthy tenants.