Insufficient Hot Water; Multi-unit Condo Building
I live in a 9 floor, 30 unit residential condo building and we have historically experienced intermittent problems with hot water getting to units or taking a long time to warm up. Recently the problems have gotten much worse and we are seeing complete outages on mid to high level floors. We have 2 gas water heaters (I believe installed in 2002)with one pump. The temp on the water heaters reads approx. 150 degrees so it seems as though that aspect might be o.k. We have been told that the pump is working fine. Units on the lower levels will receive hot water after running the water for 5 minutes or more but above approximately floor 4 no hot water is available to units. The current suggestion is that this could be an individual unit, fixture problem and that all units will need to be evaluated on a one-off basis. The contention is that a faulty valve may be causing a cross connection. Admittedly I have zero plumbing expertise but I have trouble thinking a single unit fixture could cause the entire system to malfunction. It would be an extremely timely and expensive undertaking to be checking unit by unit for each hook-up. My questions are does the above description fit the current diagnosis and are there any other troubleshooting methods that could be tested prior to the individual unit inspections? Hopefully that all makes sense... happy to provide clarification and thanks in advance for any suggestions.