Is it worth having Trace and Access Cover?
Water leaks can cause a significant amount of damage to your property, such as ceiling, floor, and wall damage that requires repair, as well as damage to possessions in your home and even the electric fittings.
In some severe cases, floorboards and joists may go rotten through water damage, so if a leak emerges in your home, you need to know about it as soon as possible to stop it from causing more damage.
However, it is not always very easy to find a leak, as it could be hidden within the structure of your home. Water pipes run under floorboards and fixtures like your bath, shower, toilet, and taps could be leaking in a place that you cannot see. It could take weeks or even months before water leaks become evident, so by the time you locate a source, a great deal of damage could have been caused.
You might notice a damp patch on your ceiling for example, which will usually dry out if rectified quickly but if the ceiling starts to sag, you may need a full re-plastering job.
How having Trace and Access cover can benefit you
Trace and Access cover is an additional part of your home insurance policy that covers the cost of detecting where a water leak is coming from using specialist equipment. The insurer will usually instruct their approved leak detection service provider, or they may ask you to find an authorised and regulated company that is local to you.
Not all home insurance policies include Trace and Access cover, which would mean if you had a water leak but cannot identify the source, you would need to pay a Trace and Access company to discover where the leak is coming from yourself.
In cases where a leak is under floorboards, to find the exact location and fix a leak, a plumber would usually need to take up the flooring and floorboards first and this could incur the costs of replacement flooring and increase labour costs, as well as the cost of repairing the leak.
If your home insurance policy is up for renewal soon, you should certainly consider taking out a policy that includes Trace and Access, to help protect you from the unexpected costs you could face if you need to pay for Trace and Access services.
This will also help to ensure that if you do have a leak that you cannot locate, the insurer will be able to immediately instruct their Trace and Access specialists so that they can use advanced tools such as thermal imaging and acoustic testing to pinpoint the source of the leak.
By using these expert services, there will be a very minimum amount of damage caused to your home, as the leak will quickly and accurately get identified and repaired, preventing further damage to your property structure, flooring, furniture, or belongings. It should also ensure that expensive work such as pulling up flooring and floorboards will only be done if completely necessary, rather than as a process of checking several different possible places to see where the leak is coming from.
Save on water bills
If there is an undetected leak in your home, as well as causing water damage, you will be paying higher water bills. At a time when energy and water bills are increasing at an alarming rate, paying more than you need to for your water is going to make bills even less manageable.
When you have a home insurance policy that includes Trace and Access cover, if you notice an unexplained increase in your water usage, then you can get this investigated. If you contact your home insurance company and explain the water usage increases, they will ask a few questions to determine whether it is likely to be caused by a water leak.
For example, having guests staying with you could lead to increased water usage, so they will want to dismiss other reasons for a sudden increase in water usage before instructing a Trace and Access company.
Rainbow International provides an expert Trace and Access service, using the most innovative leak detection technology, helping homeowners and insurers to resolve water leaks quickly, at minimal costs. Call us on 01623 422488 to learn more.