When contemplating water damage, it’s important to closely examine your homeowner’s insurance policy. According to a Chubb 2021 Homeowners Risk Report, water causes 45% of all interior property damage. Home insurance covers water damage only if it was caused by sudden and accidental malfunction of your plumbing or roof. A storm damages your shingles, and rain damages your attic? Covered. Your washing machine suddenly springs a leak and soaks your floor straight to the foundation? Also covered. A slow leak from the roof or an undetected leak from old plumbing behind the wall? Typically not covered! Even if you had no reasonable way of knowing that this type of water damage was occurring.
This is what we call hidden water damage. However, you need a special type of insurance to cover it that is not included in standard homeowner’s insurance policies.
The Mold Discovery: A Common Homeowner Dilemma
The most common way to discover hidden water damage is during minor repairs, renovations, or deep cleaning. One moment, you think everything is fine. The next, you get a peek behind your drywall or shower tile only to discover that your house is one big mold colony. That fuzzy fungus invader has infested every little pore in your drywall and structural timber, but only behind the walls where you never would have seen it. Maybe it’s got good ventilation and you never even smelled that signature musty smell.
However, because the mold was likely fed by a slow leak from a long-unmaintained pipe or tiny roof leak, it is not a ‘sudden and accidental” source of water damage and, therefore, is not covered by the water damage clause in your homeowner’s insurance policy.
Where Hidden Water Damage Comes From
Hidden water damage is, unfortunately, very common. This is because much of the structure of your home is built between layers of drywall and insulation. Almost all of your wiring and pipes are behind the wall, which means that if something goes wrong, how would you know? You would need to open up a wall to find out!
Hidden Plumbing Leak
Homes have an average of 1000 feet of pipe hidden between the walls. That’s 1000 feet of pipes and joints that could rust through or otherwise. Then water slowly trickles into the insulation or down your drywall where mold spores will eventually find it. Whether by water or mold, the damage is done and that leak will only get bigger over time. All the while you have no way of knowing that it’s there.
If your water bill is not very affected and the mold doesn’t have a strong smell, you’ll never know. Then, one day you decide to do renovations or repairs that will reveal the horrible secret.
Hidden Leak from the Roof
Of course, roof leaks can be just as bad. A single bent or damaged shingle, a flaw in your eaves, or a trickle from your gutters can allow water into your house where it shouldn’t be. Because there is so much ‘between the walls’ space in your home, there is a good chance that this trickle-down leak from the roof will find it’s way into a space that residents of the house never see.
From there, the same problem occurs. The support timbers are slowly soaked and the nearby drywall is saturated. This makes the perfect home for mold spores that take root and begin eating away at your home’s structure one tiny cellulose bite at a time.
Why Homeowners Insurance Doesn’t Cover Hidden Water Damage
Homeowner’s insurance covers water damage from sudden and accidental damage. The reasoning behind this is that damage caused by neglectful maintenance will not be covered. If your roof hasn’t been repaired in years and is riddled with broken shingles, the insurance company isn’t going to cover the costs because it is an “avoidable” type of damage. The same could be said for your plumbing, though less fairly. If your kitchen sink leaks and your cabinetry takes damage over years of dripping down into the hardboard, that’s what insurance doesn’t want to cover.
Why Acquire Hidden Leak Insurance for Your Home
The fact of the matter is that no home is perfect. You simply cannot know when hidden water damage happens. While we can’t change the standards of a homeowner’s insurance policy, we can advise on the right add-on policies that will benefit a homeowner in the long-term.
Hidden leak insurance offers several thousand dollars in remediation and repair coverage if you discover a leak that could not have reasonably been detected and prevented. You will be able to cover some or all of the expense of mold remediation, home restoration, and behind-the-wall pipe repairs needed once a hidden leak has been discovered.
Northeast Nebraska Insurance can help! Contact one of our independent insurance agents. We’ll navigate this and other unique challenges when building your unique homeowner’s insurance policy.