Home and kitchen appliance insurance

What does home and kitchen appliance insurance cover?

Home insurance will give you broader protection than warranties, generally including cover for the following (among other things):

• Water damage from floods and escape of liquid from your plumbing system
• Fire
• Lightning and storm damage
• Theft, attempted theft and vandalism
• Impact damage (e.g. from falling trees or branches)

When you're researching policies, check out the upper limits the insurer pays out for appliances, individually and in total, and what the appliances will and won't be covered against.

Some general exclusions to home and kitchen appliance insurance

There can be exclusions to home and kitchen appliance insurance in the following circumstances:

• An appliance is over a certain age (e.g. 10 years)
• You use the appliance for business
• The appliance isn't at the insured address. (If you want to insure a device you take out of the house a lot (e.g. a Nintendo Switch), think about portable contents insurance)

If you only want to insure a few high-value appliances (e.g. if you're renting), you could consider single item insurance.

Optional extras you can add-on to your home and kitchen appliance insurance

Based on what you find – and what you want to insure – you may want to add the following optional extras to your standard policy:

• Accidental damage cover (e.g. for a cracked TV screen) – this will be included in some standard home and contents policies but not others
• Motor burnout cover (e.g. for your fridge, TV, dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer)
• Specified contents insurance (for appliances with values higher than the upper limits the standard policy pays out for them)

The living room

To get an idea of the value of the appliances people use at home, let's take a room-by-room tour through a family's house (and assume they buy mid-range appliances).

The living room, where some of the highest-value gear is likely to be, is a good place to start. In the living room, you could find the following:

• TV – $1,500
• PlayStation or Xbox – $400
• Sound system/speakers – $1,000
• Google Nest – $150
• Streaming media players/services (e.g. Google Chromecast or Apple TV) – $250
• Smart lights – $300
• Total – $3,600

When you're insuring your living room appliances, think about whether you need the following extra cover:

• Accidental damage insurance (because those brand-new Sonos speakers aren't immune to falls)
• Motor burnout insurance, which can cover motors in various appliances that burn out because of a power surge, lightning or something else.

The kitchen

Let's move into the kitchen, home of high-value whitegoods and cooking helpers:

• Dishwasher – $1,200
• Microwave – $350
• Fridge – $2,000
• Miscellaneous kitchen appliances (e.g. coffee machine, toaster, blender, juicer, slow cooker, food processor, rice cooker and pasta maker) – $1,500
• Total – $5,050



Given the expense of repairing kitchen appliances and the value of what's in their kitchen, this family would be relieved they'd insured it if anything went wrong. If it did, they could even be covered for any food that spoiled in a damaged fridge or freezer.

Again, motor burnout coverage can give you extra protection in the kitchen in case of motor issues with your dishwasher, fridge or microwave.

The bedrooms

In the bedrooms, we could find the following:

• Air conditioner – $700
• Laptop – $2,000
• Smart speakers – $150
• Kindle – $350
• Second TV – $850
• Nintendo Switch × 2 (assuming both kids badgered the parents until they got one) – $900
• Total – $4,950


The home office

We'll assume this office is only used for work, and it's only appliance is a $2,500 desktop computer.

• Desktop computer - $2,500
• Total – $2,500



The bathroom

Even the bathroom has its fair share of appliances:

• Hair straightener – $250
• Hair dryer – $80
• Electric shaver – $150
• Electric toothbrushes × 2 – $350
• Bathroom heater – $300
• Heated towel rail – $450
• Total – $1,580


The laundry

In the laundry, you'll find a few high-value appliances:

• Vacuum cleaner – $650
• Washing machine (9 kg) – $1,500
• Dryer – $1,800
• Total – $3,950


For this family, the total value of their home and kitchen appliances comes to over $20,000 (!).

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Here's the bottom line

When you crunch the numbers, the value of your home and kitchen appliances is probably higher than you realise – so it's important to make sure your home insurance is giving them the cover they deserve.

Written by

Jessica Prasida

Publisher

Jessica Prasida is a travel insurance expert for Finder. She lives and breathes travel, having worked as a travel agent and branch manager at STA Travel for over 4 years, then writing about travel insurance with Finder for another 5 years. Jess has a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology, Sydney and a Tier 1 General Insurance qualification. See full bio