Resources · Water damage
The supply line under the upstairs bathroom sink let go on a Tuesday, and nobody was home until evening. By morning a restoration crew had fans running in three rooms. Your carrier accepted the loss and paid on it. What got accepted and what got paid can be two different versions of the same room.
Water is the loss type where the line between coverage and amount is hardest to see from the inside.
Hail travels together. One event on one date, and much of what follows is an argument about cost. Water isn't always like that. A carrier can accept a failed supply line, fund the ceiling underneath it, and still treat the darkened subfloor by the tub as damage that started long before Tuesday.
That's two kinds of statement inside one room. One is about the amount of a covered loss, which is all an appraisal panel decides. The other is about coverage, which a panel can't touch.
This page is an informational overview of how water losses get valued. It isn't legal advice, and your policy's exact language controls everything described below. Ironclad Assessment Group serves as a neutral appraiser and umpire. We're not a public adjuster, and we don't adjust, negotiate, interpret your policy, or settle your claim.
A water claim usually generates two money documents, and they get conflated constantly.
The first is the mitigation invoice. It bills work already performed, so it lists extraction, air movers and dehumidifiers, containment, and the days the equipment ran.
The second is the repair estimate, covering drywall, trim, flooring, cabinets, and paint. Work nobody has done yet.
Those two get argued differently, and that's rarely explained. A mitigation invoice is mostly a record, answering what equipment was there, for how long, and over what square footage. A repair estimate is a forecast, priced against what the work costs in Columbus or Dublin this year, and two careful people build different forecasts from the same wet room.
Start with the flood cut, and its height decides a great deal. Two feet is common. Four feet is common. Full height happens. Each is a different quantity of drywall, insulation, tape, and paint, and whether that insulation gets replaced is its own line. One position holds that the cut only has to reach past the documented moisture. The other holds that the wall above was wet at some point. Both get argued in good faith.
The subfloor is the same question, dried and kept or cut out and replaced.
Flooring moves the figures hardest. Say water ran down a hardwood run into the kitchen, and cupping showed up in one room. One estimate refinishes what cupped. The other holds that the run is continuous, that the product was discontinued, and that a partial replacement reads as a patch. It's the same matching problem that comes up on a hail file.
Hardwood carries a second argument. Systems exist for drying a floor in place, and whether one was used, or worked, gets disputed. Engineered flooring has its own version, because a wear layer over a plywood core delaminates the way solid wood doesn't.
Cabinets close the list. A sink base that wicked water can sometimes be swapped alone. But runs are built and finished as a unit, so where the toe kick is wet, the question becomes whether the run can be salvaged at all. Both positions get argued in good faith.
Most of the record a valuation gets built from already exists.
Moisture meters produce readings, taken at the same points across successive days. Crews commonly map them, marking the wet area on a floor plan so the extent is documented rather than remembered. Daily drying logs record what equipment ran, where it sat, and what the readings did overnight.
That record is the evidence. Where it's thin, two valuations tend to sit further apart, each filling the gap with judgment instead of readings.
Restoration work sorts water into three categories, and the category changes what can be dried and kept rather than thrown out.
Category 1 is water from a sanitary source, like a supply line or a water heater. Category 2 carries meaningful contamination, with washing machine or dishwasher discharge the usual example. Category 3 is the grossly contaminated end, the language used for sewage backups and similar losses. Whether the policy responds to water of that kind at all is its own question, separate from anything a panel decides.
The categories aren't fixed. Clean water standing in a wall for days is commonly treated as having escalated, and material that would have been dried under one category comes out under another. Which category a file got is itself disputed, and that lands directly on the amount.
At some point a water file meets a sentence like this one. The discharge is covered, but part of the damage came from a leak that had been running a long time.
Be precise about what that sentence is doing. It's an argument about cause, and where a cause argument belongs is contested ground. One view treats sorting covered damage from other damage as part of valuing the loss. The other treats it as a coverage call a panel has no business making. There isn't one settled answer to point you to, and where the line falls can turn on your policy's wording and the facts of the file. A carrier can accept the sudden event, fund the ceiling tied to it, and still place the rot near the shower pan outside what the policy responds to.
Where the disagreement is squarely about what the policy covers, rather than about what a cause contributed, an appraisal panel has no role in it. That isn't a technicality, and it can't be worked around by framing the question differently.
We won't tell you which way that comes out on your file, and nobody selling you an appraisal should. The sudden-versus-gradual line belongs with a policyholder-side insurance attorney, and the call is worth making early. Water files sit while people sort out who pays for what, and the deadlines keep running.
Mold sits on ground of its own.
Many property policies address mold, fungus, wet rot, and bacteria in terms separate from the water loss that preceded them. Some carry a sublimit. Some handle it through an endorsement. What any of that makes available is a policy-language question, and your copy is the only one that answers it.
A panel doesn't interpret policy language or decide what a limit reaches. Where the argument is whether the policy responds at all, that's the other door.
Water damage doesn't hold still. Material that was merely wet on Tuesday is doing something else the following week, and a file gets harder to value as its evidence changes.
Two provisions in many Ohio property policies matter here. Most policies contain a prompt-notice requirement, asking the policyholder to report the loss within some period after it happens. Most also ask for reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage. How long that period runs, and what counts as reasonable, come from your policy's wording and nowhere else.
The process doesn't change for water. A written demand invokes the clause, each side names an appraiser with no financial stake in the result, and an umpire decides whatever the two can't close. That sequence is laid out step by step on its own page.
What's particular to water is the record the number gets built on. The drying logs and the moisture map are most of it, and photographs taken before the flood cut fill in the rest.
Our fee is set in writing before the engagement begins and never depends on the size of the award. That's what keeps the number credible. Nobody bought it. The full picture of what we do as appraiser and umpire is on the services page.
A disagreement about what the mitigation work was worth is generally an amount-of-loss question, which is what the appraisal clause addresses. Two conditions come with it. The loss has to be covered, and the argument has to be about value rather than coverage.
That's typically an argument about what the repair involves and what it costs, which puts it in amount-of-loss territory. A panel weighs the drying record and the floor's condition against both positions. What it can't do is resolve a coverage question hiding inside the dispute.
No. Appraisal decides the amount of a covered loss and never whether a loss is covered. A denial is a coverage question, and appraisal doesn't reach it. Where a carrier accepts the loss but attributes part of the damage to a cause it says the policy doesn't respond to, that's the unsettled question the section above deals with. Put that one to a policyholder-side insurance attorney rather than to us, and do it soon.
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