declined roof claim-nail sickness?

hugoshavez

Sorry to be a stickler Stinky, but you should stop talking about tiles if it's a slate roof, it's likely to confuse matters.

With slates, if they're secured properly at regular intervals, and have an appropriate overlap, it's very difficult for the wind to get underneath and pull them up.

A claim would most likely be paid if a group at an edge has come up, but if you have random slates which have slipped from different areas then the insurance man's probably right, nail fatigue sounds like the culprit.

InsideInsurance

vaio wrote: »

Where do you get "repair" from? Assuming they are telling the truth, the OP is clear, they had the roof "overhauled"

But if it was "overhauled" you really wouldnt expect problems 6-7 years down the line and £1700 would be very cheap for a complete job let alone with scaffolding. Hence potentially defective workmanship or the OP didnt actually get a full overhaul but just patches repaired.

EdGasket

I find treating "nail sickness" with some dissolved paracetamol usually helps.

I find insurers are taking a much harder line these days than they used to. Going back twenty years, I could get almost anything fixed under insurance so long as there had been a bad storm. Not so now. They look for every way to wriggle out of paying and have an ever increasing array of exclusion clauses.

How did the insurance rep. decide it was "nail sickness"? Did he get up there and inspect the nails? I assume not. So contest the finding and when someone does get up there, produce an adjacent nail as evidence to the contrary. You might need to threaten/use small claims court though to get them to budge their position.

vaio

InsideInsurance wrote: »

But if it was "overhauled" you really wouldn't expect problems 6-7 years down the line and £1700 would be very cheap for a complete job let alone with scaffolding. Hence potentially defective workmanship or the OP didnt actually get a full overhaul but just patches repaired.

yep, you wouldn't expect problems except maybe if there was a storm which brings us neatly back to the start of the thread

I suppose bottom line is they have rejected it on grounds of "nail sickness" with the added comment that maybe when the roof was re-slated they reused the original nails.

Given the ridiculousness of both those assertions then I'd certainly be lodging a complaint and that's before you consider the FOS view as posted in #3 which basically says that if the slates wouldn't have occurred but for the storm then the FOS expect claims to be covered

.....An example would be where a consumer claimed for damage to their roof following a storm – but the roof tiles already appeared to be in a poor condition before the storm. We would carefully consider whether the roof tiles would have been displaced regardless of the storm – or whether they were in a good enough condition to have remained in place for some time, had it not been for the storm.


If we decided that the roof tiles would have been displaced regardless of the storm, we are unlikely to uphold the complaint. But if we think it is likely that the tiles were in a good enough condition to have remained in place if the storm had not happened, we may uphold the complaint.....

InsideInsurance

vaio wrote: »

yep, you wouldn't expect problems except maybe if there was a storm which brings us neatly back to the start of the thread

I suppose bottom line is they have rejected it on grounds of "nail sickness" with the added comment that maybe when the roof was re-slated they reused the original nails.

Given the ridiculousness of both those assertions then I'd certainly be lodging a complaint and that's before you consider the FOS view as posted in #3 which basically says that if the slates wouldn't have occurred but for the storm then the FOS expect claims to be covered

I would still suggest the OP needs to get more to the bottom of what the problem is with his roof, esp given he bought it with known problems and yet doesnt know what the person he paid money to fix it did.

Even if you are to successfully argue the couple of tiles that were lost in the storm should be covered that still leaves them potentially with the rest of the roof in a bad state of repair and the cost of getting that sorted. It wouldnt be a good place to be thinking you are going to have to repeat this claim/fight process everytime we have high winds because you know the roof is bad nick and the chap that did the "overhaul" actually didnt do anything but fix a few tiles.

stinky_5000

So here's my update if anyone is interested after a few more calls to morethan, and no joy I gave up on the insurance and got a roofer in, as the insurance had pointed out other slipped slates i went for a re-roof thinking as the main cost was the scaffold i wouldn't want to return to this problem again next time we had a big storm...
My roofer said there was no nail sickness and the problem was that at some point someone had used wrongly sized slates which didn't sit properly on the wooden batterns and therefore could flap a bit and come loose.. my dad nagged at me until i gave the insurance another go..so after the job i wrote another letter and sent evidence from the rooofer about the nail sickness and some stuff from bbc website regarding the red weather warning that night, requesting they contribute to the cost of the scaffold because the burden of proof of no nail sickness had been put upon me and it was incorrect..i didnt hold out much hope , but 2 days later they rang to say..weve had some more info about the weather that night and there was a gust of 76mph 1 mile from your house...hmm?? the storm was never in question?? they offered me £880..(after 150£excess). she said did i accept that?? ok... maybe i could have argued for more but i just said yes..better than a poke in the eye!!
Not had the cheque yet..so hope i am not speaking too soon!! fingers crossed!!
Thanks for all the advice

InsideInsurance

stinky_5000 wrote: »

weve had some more info about the weather that night and there was a gust of 76mph 1 mile from your house...hmm?? the storm was never in question?? they offered me £880..(after 150£excess). she said did i accept that?? ok... maybe i could have argued for more but i just said yes..better than a poke in the eye!!

Storm is well defined in insurance and is used as a defense against just poorly maintained properties. A spot of rain and a light breeze isnt a "storm".

On the basis your own roofer has said the issue is a workmanship/ maintenance one which wouldnt be covered by a Home policy then getting anything at all is fortunate and I too would have run to the hills with any quarter decent offer they made.

Voyager2002

This whole story raises the question of poor workmanship, and why it is that standards are so low in the businesses that build and maintain the houses for which we pay so much.

My own experience: I was aware of a roof problem, and after getting various people to look at it and receiving four-figure quotes for the different things that they said needed doing, an excellent roofer went up and had a look. He found that one tile had been left pushed up, and so for at least ten years rainwater had been free to enter and fall on to the felt! Putting it back in position took him a matter of seconds: his total bill for a number of necessary jobs up there was well under a hundred pounds.

We need to be far more educated as consumers of home maintenance services, and there need to be far tougher legal sanctions against incompetent workers in the building and allied trades... Another MSE campaign perhaps?