Ever since humans existed, they’ve had two basic needs – food and warmth. In terms of keeping warm, it’s taken us hundreds of thousands of years to get to the point we are at now, with centrally heated houses that look after us automatically and require very little effort or involvement on our part. In fact, they are so good at doing their jobs that we take them for granted, and our boilers are usually out of mind if not quite out of sight. Yet when something goes wrong, we know about and so does everybody else, judging by the cursing and the dark moods that result. We have the hassle of choosing and finding a replacement, the worry about how we are going to pay for it, and the difficulty of getting a reliable engineer to come out and do the work quickly. Although, as we’ll see, these problems could have been avoided if we’d taken out some form of boiler insurance.
The first point to make is that boiler insurance usually comes with some sort of service plan. The details vary between providers and service levels, but essentially you can expect that your boiler will be serviced once a year – it’s up to you if you want to pay more to cover the rest of your central heating system, and some policies will only cover a boiler for the first few years of its life, but they’re all basically the same. Services done under this type of arrangement are usually done in the summer, i.e. outside the busy season, so it gives you a couple of advantages. Firstly, it makes sure your boiler is in the best working order it can be before the winter hits and you start to rely on it. Secondly, any faults that do exist can be picked up and resolved early, with the added bonus that the fix may prevent a much larger problem hitting you later on, therefore saving you money in the long term.
If your boiler does break down, then you can offload all the difficult bits onto someone else. All you need to make is a single phone call to your insurance provider, and they’ll do all the running around. They are the ones who will contact an engineer in your area to make an appointment, so that saves you making dozens of calls only to find that most of them are booked up for weeks. They’ll also make sure the engineers turn up, as no company wants to let them down and lose a good insurance contract. Finally, once they’ve had an engineer asses the boiler, if it can’t be repaired they’ll pay for the cost of the replacement boiler and the associated labour, so you don’t end up out of pocket.
So, spending a little money on boiler insurance can give you peace of mind, save you time and money, and remove the need for you to find your nearest boilers sale to get a replacement.
Related[]
- insurance
- appliance insurance
- maintenance agreement
- heating
External links[]
- Extended Warranty Fund – Let’s Insure Ourselves] by Matt Jabs on DebtFreeAdventure