Advanced options
Insurers price cover to profit, so on AVERAGES self-insuring (service + a repair pot) wins for most working boilers: cover earns its keep if a winter breakdown would be a crisis you can't fund, if you value the guaranteed engineer callout, or if the boiler is old and grumpy (though old boilers often get excluded or loaded: read the age limits). New boilers carry 5-10 year warranties: cover on top duplicates what you already have.
What The Boiler Cover Calculator Works Out
- Cover costs: the monthly premium multiplied by 12. Policies typically run GBP 12 to GBP 20 a month, collecting GBP 150 to GBP 240 a year, usually with the annual service included.
- Self-insure expected cost: the price of an annual service (GBP 80 to GBP 100 from a Gas Safe engineer) plus the typical repair bill weighted by the chance of a breakdown. A maintained middle-aged boiler fails perhaps one year in five, at an average repair of a few hundred pounds.
- On averages: whichever is cheaper and by how much. Insurers price cover to profit, so self-insuring usually wins on averages; the premium buys certainty, which is worth paying for if a GBP 400 January failure would be a crisis rather than an annoyance.
- Policy excess (advanced): many cheaper policies charge GBP 50 to GBP 99 per claim. The expected excess (excess x chance of a claim) is added to the true cost of cover and used in the verdict.
- Service included? (advanced): if the policy does not include the annual service, you still pay for one, so it is added to the cover side of the comparison.
- Break-even breakdown chance (advanced): the yearly probability of a fault at which cover and self-insuring cost the same. If your boiler is less likely than this to break down, the pot wins.
- Introductory price and renewal rises (advanced): year-one discounts are common and premiums are often loaded at renewal. The multi-year total applies the intro price in year one and compounds the rise thereafter.
- Boiler pot after the period (advanced): the cumulative difference over your chosen number of years, which is what the pot would hold if you banked the premium instead. The honesty clause is that the pot must actually exist.
- Years duplicating the warranty (advanced): new boilers carry 5 to 10 year manufacturer warranties that cover repairs already (usually conditional on an annual service), so paid cover in those years mostly duplicates protection you have.