Escape of water explained | Saga Home Insurance

What does ‘escape of water’ mean?

Contracts and policy wording are never an easy read and often contain phrases that make you think twice about what they’re actually referring to. ‘Escape of water’ is one of them!

In everyday terms, ‘escape of water’ is just a leak at your house – where water has escaped from where it usually should be. Water in your home is usually in pipes, tanks and plumbed-in appliances where it is safely contained – and when it’s no longer contained, it has ‘escaped’.

Is escape of water the same as flooding?

Escape of water isn’t the same as flooding. Flooding, in an insurance sense, is water getting into your home from outside, such as from rivers that have burst their banks or mains drains and roads unable to cope with excess rainfall.

Your kitchen may well be flooded by your washing machine breaking, but it’s escape of water that’s the culprit – not flooding itself.

Can I claim on my house insurance for escape of water?

This is one of those, yes/maybe/it depends answers! It all comes down what sort of the cover you’ve got for your home. Take a look at your policy documents or speak to your insurer to be absolutely certain.

Once you know what type of policy you’ve got, it then depends on what you are claiming for. A buildings policy covers claims for structural and fixed or fitted things in your home, while a contents policy covers things you can remove, including carpets.

Imagine a water pipe under your bath pings apart at a weak joint. Water pours out and the first thing you know about it is a chunk of kitchen ceiling falling down and your free-standing fridge shorting out. The two things you need to claim for – your damaged ceiling and the dead fridge – are covered by different policies (or sections, if you’ve got combined home insurance). The ceiling’s covered under buildings and the free-standing fridge is covered by the contents one. But if your fridge was built in, that would be part of the buildings cover.

Examples of how your home is divided by cover type

Contents policy

TV
Carpets and laminate flooring
Furniture
Free-standing white goods/kitchen appliances

Buildings policy

Fitted kitchen units
Floorboards
Ceilings
Built-in white goods/kitchen appliances

Another thing to be prepared for is each contents and buildings section will have its own excess if you make a claim under both (an excess is the amount you have to pay towards a claim).

Some insurers might only ask you to pay the higher of the two excesses, but this isn’t always the case, so check your documents to find out.

Also, the excess on escape of water claims can be more than the general excess because of how frequent these claims are and the extent of the damage they can cause.

What causes escape of water claims?

Most escape of water claims happen in winter, when frozen pipes turn into burst pipes and then major leaks once the water in them thaws. This happened in the cold snap in late 2022 and, being early on the season, took many by surprise and lead to a rise in claims.

According to the ABI, the average cost for a winter burst-pipe claim was £9,300 in 2021. Remember the ‘Beast from the East’ snowfall in 2018? There were ten times as many burst pipes claims after that than during the same period in 2017.

Here at Saga Home Insurance, escape of water is second only to accidental damage as the most common cause for claims. But unlike accidental damage, escape of water claims usually cost more to put right.

If you can’t easily find the source of water damage, many buildings insurance policies have trace and access cover. This pays for the damage caused by finding and getting to the leak – but not always the repair.

Saga’s trace, access and repair cover includes the pipe repair too. If general wear and tear on the pipe, rather than a specific event, is causing the leak this isn’t generally covered with other companies either, but with Saga Home Insurance it is.

How to prevent escape of water damage

A little bit of water can go a long way – as can the damage it causes. Here are some basic tips to help prevent and minimise leaks in your home.

Don’t let your pipes freeze.

Any exposed pipes in garages, lofts or along external walls should be insulated from the cold. In the old days, these were lagged with thick fabric, but foam tubes do the trick too.

If you’re going away during the winter, set your thermostat to 15°C to reduce the risk of pipes freezing. If you don’t want to leave heating running, you could instead turn off the water and run all taps until the flow stops and flush all toilet cisterns until they stop re-filling. You’ll need to drain the central heating system too.

Check the sealant.

The sealant or silicone around shower trays and baths can fail over time. It can lift or degrade. You need to get up close to check, but make sure all the joins are still waterproof and intact.

Know how to stop the flow quickly.

1. Reintroduce yourself to your main stopcock. It’s probably behind a battalion of spray bottles and aerosols under the kitchen sink. Once you’ve found it, bung all those bottles in a pull-out box so you turn the stopcock without them falling like dominoes everywhere.

2. As well as the stopcock inside the house, it might be worth locating the external one where your supply meets the mains. It’s probably an arm’s length below ground level under a lid – if there’s a long metal T-bar with a three-prong claw at the end of it in your cupboard under the stairs, that’ll be the ‘key’ to turn it off.

3. If you see any screw valves, small taps or levers on any pipes that draw in water to your loo cistern or washing machine, these will turn off the supply to that area.

What if I’m the cause of escaped water?!

It’s usually when you’re trying to do something helpful that you end up doing something that isn’t. Drilling into a wall or innocently tapping in a picture hook can all reveal a hidden pipe with a jet of water in the face.

If you puncture a pipe, the cause of the claim comes under accidental damage. Accidental damage isn’t always automatically included on insurance policies – it can be added as an optional extra, or it comes as standard on superior cover levels. Check the policy before you buy or claim.

When you need a hand

If you do spring a leak, home insurance does not generally help you to get it stopped. Insurance is for putting things right after disaster has struck. However, most insurers recognise that getting a situation stopped sooner rather than later reduces the damage done.

That’s why they often have a service you can use to get help with home emergencies. This means you can call a round-the-clock helpline which can send out an emergency plumber to you. We have Saga Home Emergency that can be added to any Saga Home Insurance policy.

Who are Saga's home insurance policies underwritten by?

Saga Home Insurance policies, exclusively for people over 50, are unique products designed specifically for our customers. They are underwritten by a number of carefully selected insurers that provide our high standards of quality and service.

Saga Home Emergency Insurance is provided by Inter Partner Assistance S.A, part of the AXA group.