Condominium Plumbing in North York

Yes. North York was amalgamated into the City of Toronto on 1 January 1998, so the water utility is Toronto Water, the building permits come from the City of Toronto, and the City's backflow prevention requirements apply exactly as they do downtown. In practice this matters most for compliance paperwork: a North York corporation files with the same programme and to the same standard as a corporation on Bay Street.

All of it. Our completed work runs from 131 Beecroft Road near Yonge and Sheppard, out to 335 and 345 Driftwood Avenue in the Jane and Finch area, and across to 5025 and 5033 Four Springs Avenue near Sheppard and Leslie. Those three clusters cover very different building stock, which is deliberate rather than accidental: the Yonge corridor, the older public and co-op towers, and the newer Concorde-area buildings each bring different problems. Our office on Marlee Avenue is a short run to any of them.

Because a lot of the stock is tall, hydronically heated and cooled, and old enough that the original compensators have reached the end of their service life. An expansion compensator is what lets a heating or cooling riser grow and shrink with temperature without tearing itself apart at the joints. When one fails it can leak quietly inside a shaft for a long time before anyone sees a stain, and because every compensator in a building was installed on the same day, the first failure usually means the rest are close behind. We replaced them across both Four Springs towers and at 78 Harrison Garden for exactly that reason.

Yes, and that is how we did Driftwood. The work is phased stack by stack, so hot water is off on a limited group of suites on their scheduled day while the rest of the building is unaffected. Domestic hot water tends to be the more sensitive of the two systems from a resident's point of view, so the notice period and the scheduled window matter more, and we would rather do fewer suites a day and finish each one than push a schedule that leaves people without hot water overnight.

Some do. Kitec was sold in Canada from roughly 1995 to 2007, so the buildings at risk are the ones from that window rather than the 1970s stock, and plenty of towers have it in some suites and copper in others depending on when units were renovated. The only reliable way to know is to look: under the kitchen and bathroom sinks, at the suite shut-offs and at the water heater connections, for flexible plastic pipe with brass fittings. We opened representative points at 131 Beecroft as part of that programme. See our page on Kitec and Uponor replacement for what identification and removal involves.

The line is answered at any hour by someone who can dispatch rather than take a message, which is the part that actually determines response time. Our office is at 356 Marlee Avenue, which puts most of North York within a short run outside rush hour. For buildings we already hold maintenance contracts with, we also hold the valve chart, which means the crew arrives knowing where the isolation is instead of finding out on site with water coming through a ceiling.

It depends on the number of stacks, the suite count, the system being replaced and what is behind the walls, so a number quoted without a site visit is not worth planning around. What we can say is that the cost is driven more by repeating suite types than by total units: once the real work in each layout is priced, the building-wide figure follows from it and stops being an estimate. We come and look at the building before we quote it, and a programme is normally phased across more than one budget year.