What does Accidental Damage cover on Home Insurance?

We often recommend Accidental Damage cover for clients who want to have cover away from home for items such as jewellery, medical devices or laptops because those are the things that come to mind as things that we might damage or lose.

But in reality, Accidental Damage cover on your Home Insurance can protect you against a wide variety of things that you wouldn't normally expect - like leaving Drano in the bathtub or dropping a smouldering log on to the carpet.

Accidental Damage claims that we've seen:

• Diamond lost from a ring which had to be remade in order to replace the stone at a cost of $8,350

• Accidental damage to bathtub from leaving Drano in without rinsing it down requiring a full bathroom remodel $19,840

• Accidentally leaving a work bag in a public toilet with laptop and other items $6,455

• Accidental loss of one hearing aid somewhere in the house (this has happened to multiple clients and usually costs around $5-8k)

• Wall mounted dryer spontaneously falling off the wall which needed to be replaced along with repairs to sections of the laundry wall

• Pitting in parquetry flooring from a guest wearing stilettos inside during a party

• Accidentally leaving a plug in causing water damage - some insurers will cover this as 'escape of water' but Allianz have recently changed their wording to only cover this if you have Accidental Damage selected.

And here's a good one from yours truly... A few years ago I put a log on the fire not realising that it wouldn't actually fit. By the time I realised, the log was already on fire... oops.

I managed to get it out of the fireplace (while smouldering) but right before the front door I dropped it on to the carpet leaving a decent scorch mark. Fire is a standard Insured Event, but because the log wasn't actually on fire, this wasn't something we could claim under our standard Listed Events Home Insurance cover.

The mark is still there because we plan on doing renovations and changing the carpet anyway, and we're in an older house that's very loved. But if it was a brand new house or freshly renovated I think we would have felt differently about it, and that's why we often recommend Accidental Damage cover for newer properties where things matter more.

In the case of this client's bathtub though, this could have significantly impacted the sale value of the client's property if she didn't have Accidental Damage Home Insurance cover to fix it and was left with an unusable bath tub that she couldn't afford to fix.

When you take out insurance we always hope that you're never going to need it, but for this client, having Accidental Damage cover was a very worthwhile investment.