Home Features That Will Raise Your Insurance Premiums

• Expensive items: Jewellery, art, musical instruments, wine collections, high-end watches, sporting equipment and bicycles – lead to extra premiums, or “riders,” for coverage. Keep track.
• Swimming pools: Pools obviously represent higher liability because of the potential for drowning, liability goes up when not protected by a fence.
• Fireplace/woodstove: Wood stoves are a source of fire and smoke damage. Insurers will look for additional premiums and/or require a home inspection first.
• Oil-based heating: You’ll have trouble getting insurance if you still have an oil-based heating system since these result in environmental hazards and can cause fire. Insurers prefer electric heat or forced-air gas furnaces.
• Business property: Double the trouble: both your personal contents and business property could be lost or damaged, stolen or vandalized.
• Home being a part of your business: Bed and breakfasts, daycare, and customers or suppliers visiting your home: will all send you back to the policy drawing board.
• Aluminum wiring: A type of wiring used in houses up to 1970, insurers don’t like it because of its potential to overheat and cause fires. Policies for houses with aluminum wiring will be either more expensive or harder to get.
• Knob and tube wiring: This very old wiring – not well-suited to today’s high energy consumption levels – requires connectors that use knobs to keep the wires isolated. Insulating tubes guide wires through walls. You’ll either have to get the house rewired or pay an additional premium.
• Old house elements: Roofing and other aging house factors leads to more expensive insurance or sometimes not at all until there’s an upgrade.
• Galvanized or lead pipes: Galvanized or lead pipes are older types more likely to build up corrosion, resulting in a negative impact on water pressure and water quality. Insurers prefer modern plastics or copper pipes.
• Roof type: The least reliable roofs are wood shake or shingle, because of vulnerability to weather hazards, which are on the rise.
• Building frame: Wood frame homes are more likely to suffer from fire. Insurers like concrete or brick homes.
• Basement: Finished basements drive up costs because of potential damage if a pipe bursts or sewage backs up, or there’s flooding.
• Garden and Trees: No risk here! But in most cases you do have to pay extra if you want this type of coverage, if you’ve spent a lot of money and are worried about losing this beauty to weather, vandalism, etc.