Condo defects liability period and late aircon faults

The defects liability period on a newly completed private home runs for one year, and it is a contractual term rather than a favour. The obligation sits in the sale and purchase agreement, and developers resolve reported defects under it. That agreement is not drafted freely either. Developers are required to use the sale and purchase agreement prescribed under the Housing Developers Rules. So the period is something an owner already holds on the day of handover, not something to negotiate for later.

The clock is already running by the time keys change hands. URA's guidance is to inspect the unit after collecting the key. Defects in it, and in the housing project, go to the developer for rectification inside that year. Your own agreement names the date it starts counting from, and agreements differ. Read that clause in the first week rather than the eleventh month. Nothing else tells you how much of the window is left.

Two consequences of the period matter more than its length. A defect reported inside it stays the developer's responsibility even where the rectification work runs past the closing date. Once the period has passed, upkeep of the unit falls to the owner, who may need to engage a contractor and carry the cost. The reporting date, not the repair date, is what sits on the right side of that line.

An HDB flat works the opposite way round on the point that matters here. HDB hands over a flat with no aircon in it. A system the buyer installs privately therefore never enters HDB's period at all, and the HDB defects liability period guide covers that split. A new condo usually arrives with the system already fitted by the developer. The specifications annexed to your agreement settle it. Where the units appear on that list, they are part of what was handed over.

An empty unit cannot exercise an aircon system. Every difficulty on this page follows from that. A handover inspection runs each unit for a few minutes in rooms with no furniture, no cooking, no bodies in them and no afternoon sun already stored in the walls. Cold air comes out. Everything passes. The conditions that separate a sound installation from a marginal one all need the system working hard for hours, and hours are what a walkthrough does not have.

Drainage is the clearest case of it. A drain line carries only what the coil produces, and a coil running briefly in an empty unit produces very little. A stretch of pipe laid without continuous fall will still carry that trickle away. Move a household in, run the same unit through humid nights, and water now sits in the flat section instead of passing through it. What a level stretch does over the following months is the subject of the drain gradient guide.

Condenser siting fails the same test for a different reason. A unit standing in a recess, a service void, or a ledge shared with the stack above and below has to reject heat into air that struggles to move away from it. It ends up drawing back air it has already warmed. On a mild morning with one unit running there is spare capacity to absorb that. On a hot afternoon with every unit in the stack running there is not, which is why heat rejection varies with the day instead of sitting fixed in the specification.

The third one is invisible from the room entirely. Pipe insulation left open at a joint inside a bulkhead puts cold pipework against humid air. Condensation forms there, then travels along the run before it finds a way out. The stain lands on a ceiling with no aircon unit near it, weeks or months later. Concealed piping makes that both likely and hard to trace. It is also the fault least likely to be traced back to the system that caused it.

None of these three announce themselves. They need load, time, and a household behaving normally, which is the exact combination a vacant unit at handover cannot supply. That is why the aircon is systematically the last part of a new home to declare what is wrong with it, and why the declaration can arrive after the calendar has quietly moved on.

The useful evidence comes from living in the home, not from inspecting it a second time. What is wanted is observation under load: which rooms hold temperature and which give up, and what the outdoor units sound like after hours of running. Damp smells after a week of continuous use belong on the same list. None of it requires opening, dismantling or testing anything, and none of it should.

Cooling that falls away as the afternoon builds is describing outdoor conditions rather than the box on the wall. A room that holds fine at ten in the morning and gives up by four is worth noting exactly that way, with the times attached. Run one unit alone one evening, then run everything the next, and note how far apart the two evenings sit. That comparison costs nothing and it separates a load problem from an equipment problem better than any single reading.

Water is the observation with the shortest useful life. A photograph taken after a stain has spread across a ceiling no longer shows where the water entered. Catch it early and note the conditions around it: what was running, roughly how long for, and what the weather was doing. Then leave the unit alone. The source sits behind a cover, and the answer is not worth going after.

Sound belongs on the list too, and owners dismiss it more readily than anything else. Outdoor units that were quiet on handover day may rattle once they have run long enough to warm through. Neighbouring units running alongside them change the picture again. Note when the noise starts relative to switch-on. Note whether it shifts as the fan speeds up, and whether it needs several units running before it appears.

A developer will push back on some of what gets reported, and on part of it the pushback is fair. Commissioning covers the adjustments a new system needs once it is running in an occupied home. Control settings left over from testing, a fan speed that suits the room badly, a sensor reading a spot that does not represent the room, zones mapped in an order nobody living there would have chosen. These are matters of setup. They get corrected once and they stay corrected.

A defect is a physical condition that no adjustment can reach. A drain stretch laid without fall does not acquire fall because somebody changes a setting. Insulation that was never closed at a joint stays that way. A condenser standing in a recess it cannot breathe out of remains in that recess. The honest test is whether the proposed correction changes a setting or changes the installation, and it is a question worth asking out loud before agreeing that a visit has resolved anything.

The trap is that adjustments are the first response to almost any early complaint, because they are quick and they often do help a little. A marginal drain stops dripping for a fortnight after somebody clears the line. Cooling improves for a week after a fan setting changes. If the same fault returns in the same place, the adjustment was treating a symptom, and the second appearance is the one that carries weight. Report it with what was done the first time attached to it.

Both categories are worth raising while the period is open, which is where owners go wrong in the other direction. A commissioning adjustment costs the developer little and costs you nothing to ask for. Reporting is not an accusation and a report that turns out to be a settings matter is not a wasted one. What it does is put a dated entry against the fault, and that entry is what makes the second appearance arguable rather than a fresh complaint starting from zero.

A report naming a room and a symptom is easy to close and hard to act on. Bedroom aircon not cold gives whoever receives it nothing to reproduce. What makes a report answerable is the condition it happened under. Name the unit and the room. Say what else was running and roughly how long it had been on. Note what the weather was doing and what the controller was set to. Those few lines turn a complaint into something a technician can arrive and repeat.

Keep aircon items as their own entries rather than folding them into a general list. A list of thirty items gets triaged as a list. An aircon fault sitting at item nineteen tends to come back marked as checked and working. Somebody ran it briefly in a quiet room, and it was. Give each fault its own entry with its own conditions attached. Those conditions are what stop it being closed on a short test.

Photographs and short clips carry more than description here, and the useful ones are unglamorous. A wide shot showing where water first appeared and what sits above it. A short clip of the outdoor unit running while the noise is actually happening. A photograph of the model label so the unit can be identified without a second visit. Capture them while the fault is present, because these faults are intermittent by nature and the next appearance may be a month away.

Send it through whatever channel the agreement and the developer name for defect reporting. Keep a dated copy of your own. The date carries the weight afterwards. As noted at the top of this page, a fault put on record inside the window does not lapse when the window shuts, even if the repair work runs on past it. A fault noticed in month ten and mentioned in month thirteen is a different conversation.

Where the fault sits outside your own lot, the party who raises it is not you. A condenser on shared structure, or water tracking through a riser serving several homes, crosses the common property boundary. The management corporation holds that side of the line. Whether the ledge itself sits inside your lot is a strata plan question, and it differs between estates. Orientation is all this page offers, and legal advice is not part of it. The agreement you signed is what governs, and it names the period, the date it runs from, and what counts as a defect within it.