Absolute Mechanical re-installs systems in many "new" buildings where the original contractor was not exactly qualified to work on heavy machinery. We often see some crazy things like entire systems missing half of their required equipment to work properly, apartments installed above garages with no insulation to keep out the cold, 150,000 btu boilers installed for 500 square foot high insulated apartments.

However, what we saw last week probably wins the award for "wtf".

In 2010, we repaired a high efficiency boiler installation for one apartment in a for a fairly new building, approximately 5 years old at that time. A few weeks ago another tenant called us to fix their boiler as well, they had just moved in and were having problems with the heating. A few days after that we were called because they had no gas to their stove, but the boiler was working fine. This was outside our scope but we said we would think about what it could be, best to call the utility company. The next morning our customer from 2010 contacted us saying that his boiler wasn't working, perhaps it needed maintenance. When we came to take a look it turned out that his boiler was connected to their gas meter! Which had been locked by the utility. This happens fairly often when the apartments are recently bought, a clerical issue with the utilities.

This means that the boiler of one apartment is hooked up to the gas meter of another apartment. So for over 5 years everyone has been paying someone else's heating bills.