Schaumburg opts not to change required heating dates for apartment buildings

Schaumburg officials have opted to make no changes to the annual period in which the village requires heat to be available in apartment buildings that can offer heat or air conditioning at any given time, despite a resident's late-May complaint that mandated transition dates could be better tied to the weather.

The village board's planning, building and development committee decided to table the issue Thursday, even after seeing data compiled by staff on ways nearby communities address the same dilemma.

This is an issue only for multifamily buildings with boiler systems, which require a lengthy process to transition between heating and air conditioning. Of the 30 multifamily buildings Schaumburg staff recently surveyed, 16 had such a system.

While Schaumburg does not require any building to provide air conditioning, heat must be made available to residents from Sept. 15 to June 1 each year.

Trustee George Dunham, a member of the planning committee, said the transition from heating to air conditioning is a big undertaking for boiler systems and can't be done every time temperatures rise and fall.

"Once you turn it off, it's off," Dunham said. "To turn it back on is very problematic."

But resident Afreen Rana told village board members in late May that hot days before the required June 1 changeover have seemed to occur more often during the six years she's lived at the Legend Park Apartments at Cambia Drive and Crabtree Lane.

A string of days that reached the upper 80s at that time felt even hotter indoors, she said.

Yet, the weekend after she made her complaint proved to be unseasonably cool.

During the past five years, the village has received six complaints from residents regarding the dates of the transition from heat to air conditioning. Four were this year.

Trustee Jack Sullivan, who chairs the planning committee, said the change of seasons may have been easier to estimate at the time the current code was written, but that a perfect solution to the problem Rana described seems like a difficult one to legislate today.

Nevertheless, several Northwest suburbs have tried various ways.

Among the 12 other municipalities surveyed, Arlington Heights, Hoffman Estates, Park Ridge and Rolling Meadows don't set required dates.

Bryan Ackerlund, director of building and code enforcement in Hoffman Estates, explained that his village has eliminated defined dates of when heat is mandatory, instead requiring it be available to maintain a minimum temperature of 68 degrees.

Mount Prospect and Lombard share the same required dates for heat as Schaumburg, but in several more towns the dates are not far off.

Palatine requires heat from Sept. 15 to May 1; Elk Grove Village, Downers Grove and Orland Park require it from Oct. 1 to May 15; and Naperville and Winnetka's dates are Oct. 1 to May 31.