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The great flood of 08, what happens to my pc? Insurance wise?
Sunstrand
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey all, last night it stormed like it was the second coming of zombie Jesus and the basement of my parents house flooded. My parents are gone for a couple of days and I was just wondering how the insurance is going to work. My pc has pretty much seen it's last turn of Civ 4 it got soaked from a cascade of water coming into the basement. What does the insurance company do about computers, it was a top of the line pc a couple of years ago and cost me an arm and a leg when I purchased it. It would be super shitty if the couple of grand I spent on it would only be worth $400 now. Also I had about 2 years of vacation, and family photo's on it, lots were backed up but not all of them, do I tell the insurance dude about them?
Here is a shot of my back yard about 15 minutes into the storm, taken before I spent the rest of the night trying to stop the flooding in the basement and bailing it out.
Here is a shot of my back yard about 15 minutes into the storm, taken before I spent the rest of the night trying to stop the flooding in the basement and bailing it out.
Sunstrand on
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Shogun Streams Vidya
Shogun Streams Vidya
There's a good possibility it just got up to the motherboard and caused a short, which may or may not have trashed the computer. The only reason I point this out is if it only went up a few inches and your hard drive was mounted in the case up by the optical drive, it might be fine. For the sake of not losing those pictures it's worth looking into whether the drive still works.
In short the pc is pretty much fucked, the water was up to the top of my ankles and my iPod is in no condition to play music while I clean up this fucking mess.
edit: I'll be looking at the drives to see if I can get anything off of them, no harm in trying.
Sometimes a policy will cover the cost to replace the PC exactly as it was. So they won't pay you the thousands of dollars you paid to build it initially, but they will pay you the money to re-purchase the same computer as it is now, or something of similar value. That'd be replacement value.
Actual cash value is different. It's either the cost that one would expect the computer to be if you were to try and sell it (i.e. that $400 quote you mentioned earlier), or the initial cost of the item minus depreciation.
Either way, replacement value is usually the better bet, and if you got the "full coverage" plan, that's likely what it is. But you'll really have to check your policy.
I'm not sure if they even do that. You'd need a new replacement, not second hand, so the payout I think is a factor of original cost and the cost of a comparably speced PC on today's market. The forum member japan works for an insurance company in Glasgow, I think. One of the members from Glasgow does anyway, I think it was japan. Specific details might be a bit different between wherever you are and the UK, but he can probably give you the general idea of how a PC claim will work.
This.
The terms (at least in the UK) are "New for Old" and "Indemnity", respectively. Very few companies do Indemnity policies these days, especially for Home Insurance. The reason for this is that Insurance companies pay a whole hell of a lot less money out replacing stuff than paying money for you to do it yourself.
What will likely happen is that your insurance company will have a company it uses to repair/replace electrical items (they do this because they can negotiate huge discounts because of the volume of business they do. The supplier our company used to deal with was a bigger company than most high street chains, but nobody had heard of them because 95% of their business was insurance replacement). They'll decide what is a currently available equivalent of your computer, and then directly replace it.
They're supposed to match the spec of your machine like-for-like, in practice they may try to get you to accept less than you might otherwise be entitled to, especially if you built your machine from scratch. Just remember that you're supposed to get something the same as what you currently have, and be prepared to dig your heels in a bit if that's not what you're being offered.
Do you know who the insurance company is? I could have a look at the wordings.
EDIT:
In fact, this is a fine illustration of the reason why insurance companies do new-for-old these days. Most of the high value items people own are things like TVs, computers, laptops, etc, which depreciate like hell. I don't mean any offence when I say this, but I am thoroughly sick of arguing with people who think they're entitled to the purchase price of whatever it is that they're claiming for. Most of the time, the purchase price isn't even considered at all. Consider large plasma/LCD tvs, they've come down in price almost by a factor of ten over the last five years.
This isn't always the negative people think it is, either. If you own any gold jewellery, it's replacement value is likely 2-3 times more than the it would have been a year or so ago.
The dude next door to us got it worse than us, he just finished renovating his basement last week, he had his 54" plasma on the ground below where he was going to mount it. His insurance adjuster figured about 40k in damages. So other than my computer and iPod, I lost a crt television, 2 crt monitors a spare computer (an athlon 1800+), a camcorder. The bathroom is fucked too, it is getting gutted tomorrow.
Thanks for the help everyone.