Dripping Air Conditioner: The Bad Neighbor on Tamsui Old Street

The Buddha said: “All conditioned phenomena are but the convergence of causes and conditions; when conditions arise they arise, when conditions end they return to nothing—nothing more than this.”

And I think that living on Tamsui’s most classic and most beautiful “Chongjian Street,” with a bad neighbor who treats convenience as carelessness right outside the window year after year, is probably just such a helpless twist of fate.

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Tamsui’s First Street: Illegal Construction in a Classic Streetscape

The author’s old home sits on Tamsui’s oldest historic area—“Chongjian Street.”

Friends who have long followed Tamsui’s cultural history or urban development probably know that in recent years this old street has been the site of a fierce debate and tug-of-war between two camps: “widening the road for traffic” and “preserving the century-old stone steps and the original appearance of the old houses.” But that high-minded cultural conflict is not today’s topic. Today the author wants to talk about the reality of neighbors who “should” be living in harmony in daily life.

First, a quick reconstruction of the environment:

The neighbor’s house was originally a traditional red-brick tile old house. When it was later demolished and rebuilt, they completely ignored the legal regulations. They first completed a rough main structure of about 40 ping above ground based on the building blueprint submitted for review; after the competent authority passed the on-site inspection, they immediately ignored public safety and the strict limits of building regulations—

• No legally required fire lane space was reserved at all: The outer wall of the building was extended directly outward, pressed hard against the wall of our house;
• Serious violation of the building coverage ratio: The legally required 60% building coverage ratio limit for residential zones¹ was blatantly filled to nearly 100%, pushing the front of the building right up against the roadside, and through a second round of construction, an extra indoor area of nearly 20 ping was conjured up.

But all of this happened when the author was still in elementary or junior high school. Even if I felt something was wrong, it wasn’t my place as a junior to speak up. The elders in the family, besides having a relatively weak awareness of modern building regulations, mostly held to the rustic, accommodating attitude of “a distant relative is not as good as a near neighbor—give the neighbor some convenience.”

As the saying goes, “Give someone an inch and they’ll take a mile”—this is probably a living portrait of exactly that.

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Summer Nightmare: The Never-Ending Dripping Air Conditioner

The illegal expansion eating up the fire lane and daylight was one thing, but what truly wore people down was the accompanying collapse of everyday civic-mindedness.

Every hot, humid summer in northern Taiwan, the neighbor’s air conditioner runs all day long. Yet their air conditioner’s drain pipe was never properly connected to channel the water away, so the condensed water is left to “drip-drip” from high above, day and night, onto the awning and tin edge below.

That regular, piercing metallic tapping sound seems especially loud in the quiet alleys of the old street at night, wearing away the sleep nerves of the surrounding residents year after year. A gentle reminder earns you either the cold shoulder or feigned deafness.

This also made the author thoroughly understand: Kindness without the rule of law as a bottom line often just indulges a scoundrel’s ever-growing demands.

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Reporting Dripping Air Conditioners to the EPA: Regulations and Reporting Channels

If you too suffer from dripping air conditioners around you, remember not to just stew in silence—Taiwanese law has long had clear penalties and procedures for this:

1. Legal Basis: Article 27, Paragraph 11 of the Waste Disposal Act

According to the competent authority’s announcement, if the condensed water or cooling water of an air conditioner on a building or a fixture on land is not properly channeled away or controlled, causing direct or indirect dripping onto another person’s land, awning, or fixture, after an environmental protection bureau inspector issues an on-site warning and a deadline-for-improvement notice, if the improvement is not completed within 7 days, it is deemed an illegal act of environmental pollution, punishable by a fine of NT$1,200 to NT$6,000, with the possibility of consecutive penalties.

2. How to Report

• National Environmental Pollution Reporting Hotline: 0800-066-666
• Local Citizen Hotline: Dial 1999
• When reporting, please provide the exact address, the floor where the dripping occurs, and the specific time periods (day or night) when the unit is running and dripping. The local environmental protection bureau will then send personnel to inspect, record, and issue a citation.

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Building Knowledge: What Are “Building Coverage Ratio” and “Floor Area Ratio”?

Back to the root problem of the old house’s illegal expansion—why must modern urban planning strictly control building coverage ratio and floor area ratio?

Building Coverage Ratio

The building coverage ratio is “the ratio of the maximum projected area of a building on a site to the total site area.”

For example, if a site has an area of 200 square meters and the legally required building coverage ratio for that area is 60%, then the projected area of the ground floor can be at most 120 square meters. The remaining 80 square meters must be reserved as legally required open space, serving as street setback, planting and greenery, ventilation and daylight, and the crucially important fire separation distance between buildings.

Floor Area Ratio

The floor area ratio is “the total floor area of all floors (total volume) divided by the site area, multiplied by 100%.”

If a site’s legally required floor area ratio is 500% and the site area is 100 square meters, then under a building coverage ratio of 50% (50 square meters per floor), the building can be built up to 10 floors (50% × 10 = 500%).

[!NOTE] In the early urban planning land-use zoning of Tamsui Township, Taipei County, the legal standards for general residential zones were: building coverage ratio 60%, floor area ratio 200%; for commercial zones: building coverage ratio 80%, floor area ratio 320%.

Once someone illegally does a “second construction” to fill up the open space, it not only destroys the ventilation and daylight of the entire streetscape, but when a fire unfortunately breaks out, the fire hoses and escape routes will be completely blocked—gambling with the lives and property of the entire street’s residents.

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Conclusion

The old street is charming because the century-old stone steps and the bricks of the old houses hold the warmth of time; but if the old street is to remain livable for a long time, it cannot rely merely on the courtesy of the old days, but on whether every person living in it has at least a basic civic literacy and public-mindedness.

Don’t let a poorly connected air conditioner drain pipe, or a few ping of cheap illegal construction, become the culprit that destroys the elegant scenery of the old street.

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Further Reading:

Footnotes

1. For detailed regulations on building coverage ratio and floor area ratio, see the Construction and Planning Agency, Ministry of the Interior’s “Building Technical Regulations” and the urban planning land-use zoning control points of each municipality and county/city. ↩