to think £1700 for house insurance is ridiculous

[ChocFrogKnife]

3 bed thatched property with a wood burner but, even so, £1700 is outrageous and that’s the lowest we can find

I expect you've already gone through a specialist broker @ChocFrogKnife

Have you looked at The Thatch Advice Centre

Ours rejected a claim for genuine storm damage and only paid up after 6 months of arguing. Despite photos showing that one day it was fine and the next it was damaged by a storm (they acknowledged the storm!) they said it was down to lack of maintenance (it wasn't) and tried not to pay. Eventually they paid out £18k, which was likely less than the repair costs but was better than nothing. Then they put our premium up, obviously.

Much sympathy, most insurers are a bunch of cunts.

Our thatched cottage is about £1000 a year for insurance but no wood burners. Anything that adds to fire risk adds a lot to insurance for thatch. Our neighbour has wood burners and there's is about double ours.

@ChocFrogKnife It's a thatched house - when you buy a thatched house you accept the insurance will be extortionate.

Firstly, 90% of thatch fires are from chimneys. Secondly, once it catches fire then it pretty much wipes out most of the house with huge costs to the insurer.

Get rid of the log burner or pay the higher premium.

The thatch is designed to repel water, so once it starts burning downwards, it's really hard to stop the fire spreading into the house, hence the high cost to insurers. The fire brigade have to use equipment to pull all the thatch onto the ground.

Ours isn’t even pretty, it’s just an ugly bug with a thatched roof. We debated whether to get it changed to pantiles rather than getting it rethatched but it would have been even uglier then.
Beautiful location and views make up for that though.

@ChocFrogKnife I’m sure it’s more beautiful than my boring new build! Do they get a lot of spiders? I always imagine them having spiders!

Sounds about right. We're in a cottage with 2 wood burners, not thatched but clunch so who the hell knows how it's stayed up the last 300 years. Really limited choice on insurers so we pay over 2k a year.

Not too many spiders but we get lots of bees and rats.

We have to jump through lots of hoops to get the insurance - fire extinguishers on each floor, fire blanket in the kitchen, chimney swept twice a year, electrical inspection certificate every 5 years, thatch inspection certificate every 10 years, chimney a certain minimum height above the thatch.
The thieving bastards will probably find a way out of paying up if we ever did have to claim though.

Wood burner & thatched roof sounds a great combo.

I don’t think the price sounds unreasonable, niche & old building with high risk of catching fire

If you feel this way about your insurer, change insurance company. Look at their claims satisfaction scores. You aren't buying a service with insurance, you're buying a promise. What's the point in paying £1700 for a promise you don't think will be kept?

I'd rather pay more and know that the claims service would have my back if we needed it.

Get tif of the woodburning. I mean get it shut off so its oy ornamental

We use a broker from Howden and I agree. We have a very non-standard house and they've been able to work miracles, including finding us insurance during a renovation that no one wanted to touch.

Your dp needs to pay the insurance then as it’s his choice you keep the thing they will set your house on fire!

Id take the wood burner out

@CaptainCarrotsBigSword Few claims services have your back! They want to to save money. Ways they do this are saying you are under insured and saying defects were existing conditions. Also not being willing to accept some building components are special one offs. Never, ever under insure. They want to know about handmade 16th century bricks, that 17th century fireplace, your decorated ceilings and your expensive old limestone flagstones. Dont give them an opportunity to say you have not declared how special your house is.

Ok, I’ll let him know 😀

This is why you need to a) pay the higher premium for a decent insurer, b) check their claims service, and c) (as you said) declare everything, check the exclusions, and make sure you're not underinsured.

Underinsurance is a massive problem. Most people are underinsuring their home contents. If you have an older or non-standard home you are probably underinsuring the buildings too.

That’s what ours costs. 400 year old timber framed house.

Then don't pay the "thieving bastards"! 🙄

Also, half of what they are asking you to do are standard house requirements, thatch or no thatch.

Remove the wood burner?

This is like buying a house on a flood plain, then complaining about the flood insurance costs.

ETA: I once bought a London flat that had an uninhabited basement. I noticed a water mark a few feet up the wall. So I took the effort to get insurance with flood coverage (not all of them will do it) and paid the extra.

Two years later, the basement - with a lot of my stuff in it - flooded. I was covered for everything, including replastering. Think hard before you call them "thieving bastards".

Ours is much cheaper… but we don’t have a thatched roof or a wood burner. There’s a lesson in there somewhere!

@CaptainCarrotsBigSword Absolutely. The insurers won’t pay out. Complaining about insuring an old thatched house with a wood burner is just silly. It’s one of the most vulnerable buildings in terms of residential use.

I grew up in a village full of thatched roofs. House fires were a very common occurrence especially on bonfire night!!