ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A new crisis is emerging in the wake of energy prices skyrocketing with oil heaters becoming too expensive to run.
Typically the cheapest option when it comes to slightly warming a room that leaks heat like a cheap cotton jumper, oil bar heaters are usually the most expensive and inefficient way to heat a space.
Oil bar heaters have traditionally been the go-to method for tenants to burn their landlord’s house down as they tend to cover them in rags they call clothes.
Now that those people now have to simply put up with the cold because the cost of power is too much, housing industry commentators have said the options tenants have to accidentally set fire to their landlord’s house are more limited.
“Covering a heater was the tried and tested method,” said Graham Gunk, of Gunk Leasing in the French Quarter.
“Without the option of covering a heater in a synthetic blanket, tenants are left with other more crude ways to set fire to a house. Methods like heating up oil and fat until it catches on fire and then throwing a bucket of water on it. Plugging three 12-socket powerboards into one outlet and then taping the Clipsal fuse up so it can’t flick off when it’s overloaded. It’s also detrimental to landlords because you often get tenants that haven’t read the Dummie’s Guide to Carbon Monoxide Poisoning and put one of those outdoor mushroom heaters in the living room,”
“When that goes pare-shaped, the media often ask why the landlord let the house get to the point where heating it with a giant burning orb of gas was the last option left.”
However, Mr Gunk said there was one option that was far worse than the others.
“Landlords live in fear that one day, the government will force them to bring their homes up to code and not only provide luxuries like an oven and running water, but also airconditioning and insulation. If houses had to be retrofitted to make them more efficient, thousands of landlords around the country would be forced to holiday domestically like un-gelded Catholics with six kids and a blue-smoke-blowing Holden Zafira.”
More to come.
