Excavator Insurance Australia

Plant and equipment insurance explains how a payout is worked out. This is the bit that catches excavator owners.

Most owners think a low sum insured only bites on a write-off. It bites on repairs as well.

On the main wording we place there is an average clause. Insure the machine for less than 80 per cent of what it is worth and the insurer pays only part of a repair bill, worked out against that 80 per cent mark.

On a write-off it works the other way. The calculation is capped at your sum insured, so a low number is simply all you get. How a write-off is settled is answered on the plant and equipment page.

Check it against what the machine would make at auction today, not what you paid for it.

This is the most common gap we find on an excavator schedule.

Buckets, hammers, augers, grabs, tilt hitches, rippers, compaction wheels. The usual default is $10,000 for each machine for the whole year, unless your schedule names a bigger number. One hydraulic hammer can cost more than that on its own.

GPS machine control is worse. We went through the plant wordings we place looking for it. Not one mentions GPS, machine guidance or machine control. A kit worth tens of thousands sits in a category nobody has written a rule for.

Name it on the schedule. If it is not listed, do not assume it is covered.

Underground services are not sub-limited. They are excluded.

Cover comes back only if you obtained current written plans from the appropriate authority, and then acted on them. Five hurdles sit inside that one sentence:

• You obtained the plans. Asking is not enough.
• They are current. Last year's set is not.
• They came from the appropriate authority, not memory and not a mate's sketch.
• You followed them.
• Even then, these claims carry their own higher excess.

A Before You Dig Australia enquiry is free. BYDA does not send the plans. It passes your job to the asset owners, who send them.

And those plans are the lowest accuracy grade there is. The only reliable position is a service you have potholed and exposed.

One word on cheap liability. A plant wording handles services properly. We have read general liability wordings that say nothing about them at all, which is worse, because silence gets argued about after the bucket goes through a gas main.

And if the job is deeper than ten metres, or wholly underground, your liability cover is out of it entirely. Ring us first.

Plant policies cover accidents, not wear.

Mechanical, structural and electrical failure are excluded, along with wear and tear, metal fatigue and corrosion. If that failure causes a fire, the fire damage is covered. The part that failed still is not.

Misfuelling is out. Running low on oil is out, unless it causes a fire or an accident. Cut rubber tracks are out unless the cut came with a covered loss.

Breakdown cover is not standard on a plant policy and not every wording offers it. If you want it, that decides which wording you belong on, not the price.

You do not need a high risk work licence to run an excavator. You do need proof the operator was trained and shown to be competent. That is a policy condition as well as a safety duty, and with no ticket to point at, the logbook is the proof.

Service records matter too. Keep them now and a claim is paperwork. Find them later and it is an argument.

Same policy. Different risks.

Rubber tracks sit inside the track exclusion. Steel tracks on a twenty tonner do not.

Minis get dry hired to homeowners and small builders far more often, which lands them on the hardest conditions in the policy.

They also get stolen the most. One insurer grades its theft excess by machine type, and the list is mini excavators, skid steers and Dingoes.

Where a stolen machine is never recovered, payment generally waits ninety days from the day the theft is discovered. Ninety days with no machine and no money. Ask about downtime cover, and check it pays when the machine is out on dry hire.

A typical plant quote is a machine value and a machine type. That is it.

We start with the schedule. What attachments you own and what they are worth, whether the sum insured still matches the machine, and whether your work sits inside the liability section.

On every plant policy we place we turn on the market value plus option as standard, so a depreciated machine is not settled at bare market value. It does not run on the highest-value machines. How far that top-up goes, and where it stops, is on the plant and equipment insurance page.

We have disclosed our commission on every invoice since 2010. And if an insurer starts doing the wrong thing on a claim, we escalate it.

Not the make and model, mostly.

• The sum insured, and the machine's age.
• The split of what you do, and how much you subcontract. On a plant policy the underwriter prices the work, not just the machine.
• The liability limit you pick, and the sub-limits underneath it.
• Whether you dry hire the machine out.
• Whether you buy downtime, substitute hire or finance protection.
• Five years of claims history, and any break in cover.

We will not put a price on this page. A real number needs your machine, your work and your excess.