REQUESTED RESPONSES TO UTILITY SERVICE LINE INSURANCE ADVICE
I called myinsurance office…Allstate… and they said inside my house is covered but notoutside service lines from house to street. RESPONSES: 1)Check your homeowners insurance—these items maybe covered. 2) I have the protection and justused it. They did a great job and the repair would have cost me severalthousand dollars. The insurance costs about $20 per month extra. So ifyou pay for 10 years you spend about $2400 and one repair could easily exceedthat. We have the all theservices you listed below except the water line, I didn’t take that one becausewe have a copper line. 3) Sometimes the utility line insurance iscovered by your homeowners insurance, depending on your policy. When I waslooking into this, I do remember some horror stories about people not beingcovered for their utility lines, and if there is a pipe break between yourhouse and the main line, the homeowner is responsible. It can be quite costlyto fix. So, if you don't have it covered by your homeowners insurance, it maybe wise to get it. That said, there are endless things you could insure! I haveopted not to go with the similar electrical line insurance, which replacesdamages for what happens between the home and the house. There's less downsiderisk because it doesn't require digging into the ground. 4) So I have water and sewer protection through my home insurance - Erie - butam not sure if it covers gas lines. 5) I was going to buy some of thatbut then found out that my homeowner’s insurance covers broken pipes. I have Erie insurance. 6) Myunderstanding is that these programs often offer very little protectionrelative to their cost. There was a bit of a scandal with PWSA's programa few years back, for example: https://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2011/03/19/PWSA-pulls-plu... Typically it's a thirdparty insurer that has a deal with the utility to sell their product using theutility's branding (on mailers that look like official mail rather thanadvertisements, or as part of their customer service scripts, for eg). That may be why the utility co.'s meter checker was trying to sell youinsurance. Not that you shouldn'tconsider this type of insurance if you need it, but consider talking to yourhomeowner's insurance agent and getting a few competing quotes first.
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Lynn Raith