Storm Darragh. Freezer contents claim.

mikrt

Since the severe winds last weekend, were without electric for just over 3 days 18 hours (as were all of our small village).

I had to ditch the contents of freezer in my works skip, and tomorrow will be refilling it.

I am preparing to claim for cost of this food (as well as National Grid's other hourly payment (£85 1st 24/48 hrs (depending on amount of outages NOT severity of storm) & £40 every 6 hours after).

It's a tall, modern freezer (Samsung Bespoke) and held a fair amount.

I'm not sure how much to claim, should I just pick an estimated amount (NOT wanting to take the P***) of say £200, or use the bill for replenishing do you think.

I did read previously that freezer contents aren't covered, but I received a text from them, specifically mentioning to claim for food and hotel (we stayed home) after power was restored last night.

Thank you in advance.

Brie

I would make out a shopping list and see what that looks like based on getting it delivered from Tesco or someone.  

Basically I did the same when we were burgled.  I thought "random silver earrings maybe £100?" but when I listed them all it was 10 times that.  Essentially I closed my eyes and "looked" at my jewelry box to see what was in there - surprising how many I'd acquired.  And freezers are somewhat the same.  If you had your food for the holidays in there (turkey, roasties, sprouts & beef, parsnips, mash) that in itself could be £200.  Add all those indian meals, frozen chips, half bags of carrots and cartons of home made chilli and it all adds up!!

Reed_Richards

Too late now but I would have taken photos of the freezer contents before ditching them.

mikrt

Yeah I realise now. The intention was to empty it while frozen and take over to my daughter's spare garage freezer, but as soon as starting to load I realised it was too late. 

Remembering of course, that while emptying the freezer (and fridge) contents, I wasn't expecting to be able to make a claim.

EssexHebridean

I suspect this is going to come down to the limit you can claim on your own home insurance, as by “food” I suspect they mean the added expense of eating out while you were away from home due to the power outage. 

MattMattMattUK

My policy allows me to claim up to £500 for the value of lost food in fridges and freezers, although they do expect that cost to be evidenced by pictures of the food that was in the freezer. I cannot see how "I went to the supermarket and spent X stocking up again, with no evidence of what was in my freezer before" would be allowable. 

SAC2334

Insurance companies may well refuse it on the grounds that Storm Darragh did not fulfil their criteria of what is a storm as the wind speed which the Met Office published as gusting up to 53 mph did not reach their policy speeds as over 55 mph
There was a report in the news on Wednesday about someone's roof tiles blowing off being refused because wind speed was less than 55 mph.
Definitions of a meteorological  storm is when the low  pressure system has dropped 24 millibars and does not rely on just wind speed but insurance companies will have their own definitions in the small print I presume .

p00hsticks

We certainly had 70mph+ gusts recorded over on the north east coast, and we were only in a yellow warning area.....
Far worse that they had forecast on this side of the country, with many fallen trees....

DullGreyGuy

mikrt said:

I'm not sure how much to claim, should I just pick an estimated amount (NOT wanting to take the P***) of say £200, or use the bill for replenishing do you think.

In the insurance world most will have a per litre of capacity of the freeze price that they pay for spoiled food if the freezer are full of batch cooked meals etc which obviously dont have an RRP. For those covering a range of customers they may have an Aldi, Sainsbury's and M&S Foods price per ltr. 

Sum is fairly simple, Capacity x % utilisation x Rate. 

When we had a claim we used £1.30 per L which would be at the higher end of the spectrum 

FreeBear

mikrt said:  I had to ditch the contents of freezer in my works skip, and tomorrow will be refilling it.

I'm not sure how much to claim, should I just pick an estimated amount (NOT wanting to take the P***) of say £200, or use the bill for replenishing do you think.

How do you put a value on a face you haven't seen for ages...

mikrt

Remember people, this isn't insurance claim. It's off the electric company 😉👌