How can I sue/take legal action against hotel for water leak which damaged my goods? Money Claim?

tightauldgit

Money_Grabber13579 said:

tightauldgit said:

DullGreyGuy said:

tightauldgit said:

I think the biggest issue here would probably be that the hotel could probably make a decent case that the value of a second hand laptop that is more than 5 years old of unknown provenance is zero. 

They would struggle to prove that when you can see on eBay that similar laptops are selling (not just being listed) for £60-90.

If the engineer can confirm more details like processor, ram, hd type/capacity then you can more accurately see what they sell for and may be higher than that range.

They don't really have to 'prove' it though since they would merely be defending a claim. A 5+ year old laptop is beyond the end of it's expected life and pretty much worthless. It would be up to the claimant to prove otherwise. I don't know how much weight ebay sales of 'similar' laptops would weigh because we really don't know anything about the condition of the specific laptop in question. If you get an independent expert valuation of the specific laptop then yes that's probably more convincing to a judge - but is it worth the effort? 

I'm a bit surprised the hotel didn't offer £50 or £100 goodwill to make the thing go away but maybe the OP went in a bit heavy in overvaluing the laptop to begin with? 

Is a laptop really only expected to last 5 years, before it ceases to serve any useful purpose whatsoever? I still occasionally use the first laptop I bought and it is now 17 years old and running windows 10. The laptop I use daily is around 10 years old and still working reasonably well. Maybe I’ve been lucky but I’d be surprised if a 5 year old laptop had absolutely no value, although depends on the spec when originally purchased I guess.

I think normal accounting practice is to fully depreciate laptops over 3 years and I think if you were making a claim under the CRA for a faulty laptop then your 'deduction for use' would be based on an expected lifetime of 3-5 years. 

If nothing else the batteries in laptops have an expected lifetime which is typically in that range. 

Yes we all know of items lasting way beyond their expected lifetime but those are outliers generally. The issue with valuation is that the value of something 5-10 years out is going to be based a lot on the specific condition of that particular item so yes a good condition laptop with everything working and the battery still holding a charge might well be £50-100 but does that represent the 'average' laptop of that age or are 80% of them already in landfill?