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Verdun family going on one week without hot water

Click to play video: 'Frozen pipes leave Verdun tenants without hot water'
Frozen pipes leave Verdun tenants without hot water
WATCH ABOVE: Tenants of a second-storey apartment in Verdun say they have been without hot water for close to a week due to frozen pipes. As Global's Sarah Volstad reports, the family of four claims the landlord is refusing to help – Dec 31, 2017

Verdun resident Sebastian Nitor says his family is going on its sixth day without hot water.

And his landlord, he says, refuses to do anything about it.

“They haven’t found any kind of measures to compensate us in any way, or help us out,” said Nitor.

Both tenant and landlord suspect the problem to be a frozen pipe.

Nitor says the same thing happened last winter, and the landlords brought in a plumber to fix the problem.

“And now it happened this year and they told me, ‘We’re not doing it, we’re not spending the $800 that we had spent last year,'” he said.

Nitor shares his second-floor apartment with his wife and two children.

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READ MORE: Hundreds of residents at NDG apartment complex without adequate heating

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Ten-year-old Penelope has Williams Syndrome, a genetic disorder which affects her seventh chromosome.

“Four years ago, we found out she’s autistic on top of it all,” said Nitor. “She’s in diapers 24/7. That’s exactly why we need to give her a nice shower or a bath.”

The landlords live upstairs. Their hot water is working.

“We still have hot water running just fine,” landlord Min Ho Kim told Global News.

Kim says his apartment has had similar problems in the past, but that he figured out how to prevent it.

“We learned: let’s keep the temperature a little bit higher than usual, and keep the hot water a little bit running — it will never freeze,” said Kim. “[Nitor] didn’t want to do any of that, because he didn’t want to pay more electricity bills.”

READ MORE: Some DDO residents told to keep taps running 24/7 to avoid frozen pipes

Nitor says that simply isn’t true. He says the apartment has been ridden with problems since day one, and they’re only getting worse.

“Everything that happens here, that I try to talk to the landlord, try to be reasonable, within what we deserve to have as tenants, it becomes a fight,” said Nitor.

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Nitor told Global News he’s fed up with fighting and fed up with sponge-baths.

If nothing changes soon, he’ll take matters into his own hands.

“I don’t want to tolerate it [any] more,” he said. “I’m thinking about calling a plumber myself. And that’s gonna make more problems between me and the landlord because then I’m going to want the money back. I understand that it takes time for everything but, you know, this is urgent for us.”

Nitor hopes the new year will bring new solutions to their water woes.

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