If your plumbing leaks and damages your neighbours property...

[nonamenopackdrill]

The old man next door has some problem with his washing machine which has caused an amount of mould to appear on our living room wall.

He's a lovely man, so we're going to sort it for him!

 

[Giles]

As I mentioned, its a guesture

They will hav to claim off their own insurance anyway and should your own insurance dem that the accident wasnt your fault, then their insurance will have to accept the entire claim from them

If it was deemed to be negligent on your part by your insurers, then their insurers could get their costs back from yours and your neighbours would not be hit with any excess ( im pretty sure )

Either way, if you werent negligent , but their flat as damaged and they then had to go through the tit for tat insurance rigmarole, it would be nice to make sure they werent out of pocket for their excess, as whatever happened, it certainly ant their fault that they got flooded.

Sueing a plumber ? very difficult to be honest - difficult to foresnsically identify the root cause of the problem and the plumbers influence on it. for example of you get a spanking new boiler fitted an a few weeks later, the rads blow - which they nearly always will cos of the pressures etc of the new boiler vs. the old decrepit rusted rads - this aint the plumbers fault, as the boiler itself didnt blow.

In this case, as I said earlier, because its a set of flats in a block, the buildings insurance will be one policy for the whole building, paid for by the freeholder, and the premium then divided between all the leasehold flat owners.

So there will be one claim for all the damage done by the water leak. Which just leaves the excess to agree on, plus any damaged contents.

For most plumbing leaks, you can't really hold anyone to "blame" unless it is a recently-installed thing and you can show that it was fitted incorrectly.

Pipes burst, valves stick open, drains get blocked, radiators rust through, etc. It isn't generally appropriate to "blame" someone.

Giles..

 

[zoltan]

In my case- a wildly random series of events and a 1,000,000 to one chance occurence flooded a flat I rented out and damaghed the flat downstairs. alot.

The block had biuldings insurance as a whole, but conmtents insurance as an individual choice. I had to pay for my own CH to be repaired, but the biuldings insurance wouldnt cover downstairs internal damage AFAIK and he had to claim from his own contents insurance.hence I gave him the £50 or whatever and made profuse apologies, whithout admitting any responsibilities.

His contents people wanted to take me to court for damages, but cos I was able to produce receipts and certificates to prove the system was in tip top condition and a note from the CORGI engineer/ plumber/ sevicing fellow stating what had happened (an act of god effectively ), it was a bit of a no mans land, with about 4 different insurerss trying to push the cost onto each other whislt at the same time deflecting claims againt them - I think they eventually settled it by each covering their own bit and leaving it at that.very messy.

I also got dragged into the next door neighbours - where they had some water discolouration in their plaster -I restated that It was an accident I and I would cover their excess, but they would have to initially claim from their insurers and they in turn would settle with mine etc etc etc .We shook on it and parted company having exchanged home phone numbers etc should other problems arise

2 weeks later, their solicitor wrote to me stating that they were going to sue me for mental angush and about 3 other petty items based on negligence, even though we had ( I thought ) settled it peacefully. At that point I got arsey, contered their claims by producing the "act of god" documantation, got their fallacious claim booted out of court and embarkled on a spree of such wickedness and scowling intimidation that they legged it soon aferwards.Hoogstraaten would have been proud.

PS , they were both city lawyers and slimy twats

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