Home Emergency Cover - What Is It? We’re Here to Breakdown the Jargon For You

Home emergency cover is great. When something goes wrong in your home, it’s a weight off your mind to know you have financial cover for any urgent repair work that needs doing.

But what exactly counts as an ‘emergency’ when it comes to this type of insurance? And when you already have policies to cover your home contents and buildings, why do you need it?

Let’s delve into some of the jargon and see if we can make sense of it all.

Defining an emergency

Let’s say you are unlucky enough to suffer a burst water pipe, which results in a large quantity of water flooding your home. It’s the middle of the night when you discover the problem. Your first priority is to shut off the leak, so you call an out-of-hours plumbing service to get someone out asap.

The water is stopped, the burst pipe fixed and you turn your attention to damage caused by the flood. It turns out that the spray of the water from the pipe has severely damaged the plasterwork on a wall, while the build-up of water has ruined a wooden floor. You are able to make a claim for these on your buildings insurance. Unfortunately, one of your children’s tablets also got caught in the crossfire of the spray. You claim for this against your contents insurance.

But what about fixing the initial problem, the burst pipe itself? You’re surprised to find out that neither your buildings or contents insurance policies cover you for this. And because it was an out-of-hours call-out, the plumbers’ fees don’t come cheap.

This is a classic example of a home emergency, and exactly what home emergency insurance policies are designed for - to cover situations that slip through the gap between contents and buildings insurance. A useful working definition is that home emergency insurance covers you for the cost of fixing the cause of a problem, not the damage that results from it - which is what buildings and contents insurance are for.

However, not all issues count as an emergency. You wouldn’t, for example, get very far if you called out a plumber to fix a leaking tap and then tried to claim against a home emergency policy. So what counts as an emergency?

There are slight variations from provider to provider, but in general terms, an emergency for the sake of making a claim is anything which threatens to damage your home, compromises the security of your home or endangers the health and safety of you and your family. So in the above example, the cost of calling out a plumber to fix a burst pipe out of hours would be covered by home emergency insurance because it prevents further flood damage being done.

Other examples of what home emergency insurance would cover you for include any issues with your gas supply or boiler, and likewise your electricity supply, on safety grounds. Similarly, if you find you have no running water and it is not down to an issue with the mains supply (your water company would tell you this), you could also claim for work to detect and repair the problem on health grounds. Likewise calling out a pest control specialist to deal with an insect or rodent infestation.

On the security side, a classic example is losing the keys to your home and either not being able to get in or lock your doors. While this might sound very different to fixing a burst pipe, many home emergency policies would pay out for calling a locksmith.

Hopefully, this has helped to clear up what can be a slightly bewildering area of home insurance. If you would like to find out more or are ready to get a home emergency insurance quote, click here.

*The information in this blog is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. Please seek a professional for expert advice as we can not be held responsible for any damages or negative consequences upon following this information.

4K Ultra HD, 4K UHD, or just plain old 4K. These have all become stock phrases you have probably seen or heard shouted loud and proud from ads and promotions for the latest TV sets. But what exactly do they mean, and why should you get excited about them?

Technical jargon has a way of worming itself into our collective vocabulary without much thought about whether everyone really understands what the terms mean or not. 4K Ultra HD is a classic example. Over the last few years, it has become marketing shorthand for “this TV provides amazing picture quality - don’t settle for any less when you are bingeing on your favourite series or cheering on your favourite sports team!”

And that’s as much as the average person in the street would be able to tell you - 4K UHD means brilliant picture quality. But what is the difference to, say, plain old HD? And is 4K really the best of the best if you are on the hunt for the perfect picture?

Screen resolution explained

Let’s start by going back to basics. HD, of course, is shorthand for high definition, which is a term used to describe the resolution, or picture quality, of a screen. Resolution is a technical feature defined by the number of pixels on the screen. The basics of it are, the more pixels you have on a screen, the more detail you are able to render and so the better the picture quality.

Prior to the arrival of HD in the late 1990s, the standard definition for TV sets (SDTV) had been 720x480 pixels - or close to 350,000 pixels in total. When HDTV arrived, it improved on this in two phases, first of all with ‘HD ready’ sets with roughly one million pixels (1366×768 was a typical resolution of early HD ready LCD screens), then ‘full HD’ - 1920×1080, or approximately two million pixels.

This is where the naming conventions of screen resolutions starts to get a little confusing. Full HD is often known as ‘1080p’ - describing the number of pixels you get in a single vertical column on the screen. At the same time, you may see it referred to as ‘2K’ - because full HD screens usually have around 2000 pixels in every horizontal row.

It is this latter (though probably less common) convention that the ‘4K’ part of 4K Ultra HD has followed - UHD screens have roughly 4000 pixels in every row. A typical Ultra HD resolution, for example, is 3,840x2,160. The mathematically minded amongst you will have spotted that that works out as more than eight million pixels in total - so four times the resolution of a full HD screen.

So if you’re looking for the best picture quality available, surely it’s a no-brainer - you have to go for 4K UHD, right?

Well, yes and no. There’s no doubting 4K looks great, it’s a marked improvement even on full HD, and 4K screens are no longer even that expensive. But whether you need 4K UHD is another question. To get the best picture quality on the biggest screens, for example - certainly anything upwards of 40 inches - you want as many pixels as possible, so 4K should be your starting point. But if you are content with a much smaller screen - for secondary TV screens in bedrooms, for example - you might not notice much of a difference between full HD and UHD.

Another consideration is that to get the true Ultra HD experience, TV programmes and movies have to be shot in UHD as well as broadcast/played in UHD. Although production companies are now responding to increased demand for 4K, there is still a lot of TV and video content out there that is made for lower resolution playback. Put simply, video filmed below 4K doesn’t have the detail to fill all those pixels on a UHD screen. Your Ultra HD set therefore has to adjust to fill in those blanks, and some people complain they don’t like how that looks.

Finally, while 4K Ultra HD has become the de facto standard for new TVs and film making, it is no longer the hottest prospect in town in terms of picture quality. If you really want to crank up the picture quality - and have the deep pockets to match - 8K UHD next generation screens are available, packing a massive 32 million-plus pixels, or four times the resolution of 4K.

Whether you decide to play it safe with a budget full HD TV or splash out on a next generation 8K set, make sure you insure your TVs with Row.co.uk’s fabulous value TV insurance, starting at just £1.49 a month.

*The information in this blog is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. Please seek a professional for expert advice as we can not be held responsible for any damages or negative consequences upon following this information.