Is Sewer Backup Covered by Home Insurance?

I often get the question “is sewer backup covered by home insurance?” I’m standing down here in my basement in my house, and the reason why I’m here is that I want to show you guys this sewer pipe.

One of the common things that can happen to a home is that the sewer pipe which runs under the house, can back up. There are lots of different reasons for that happening. One of those is because the pipe can get clogged from different things such as flushing certain things down the toilet. Also when we have these heavy rains like we have had over the past several months, that pipe can also shoot water back up to it. And you can imagine that if water were to come up through this pipe, it can create quite a bit of a mess. Now, if you look around here, we have a personal freezer, have a water heater, and most importantly I have my furnace all next to this pipe and that can be a big problem if that water came up and destroyed any of this stuff. If any of that got wet, that could cost me thousands of dollars.

Risk Mitigation

Now what you need to know is that there are ways to prevent that water from coming up. I would talk with a plumber about that. Solutions on how to do that. Some people recommend putting plugs in these things as well as some other mitigation ways of preventing it from happening.

Another thing that you can be doing is talk to your insurance agent, like myself, or call WA Group and talk to us. Coverage for sewage backup is usually not covered by a home insurance policy, but you can add it on for a very low price and get lots of coverage. Typically in this situation, I would recommend at least $10,000 in coverage simply because just cleaning them mess up can cost at least $5,000.

So do yourself a favor and talk with your agent. Talk with your plumber, take care of this problem because it could lead to a lot of damage.

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