What insurers write about an empty cottage
Most home and cottage policies deal with an empty building in two separate places, and owners often read only one of them.
The first is how long the place may sit empty at all. Intact’s homeowners comprehensive wording, which a broker hosts online, does not insure loss or damage that happens after the dwelling has, to the owner’s knowledge, been vacant for more than 30 consecutive days. It defines vacant narrowly, as everyone having moved out with no intention of returning, so ask your broker how your own policy treats a cottage you close each winter and plan to reopen. Broker summaries describe limits of 30 to 60 consecutive days for an unoccupied home across the market.
The second is freezing during the heating season, which is where a check schedule comes in. The same Intact wording excludes freezing damage during the usual heating season in a normally heated part of the home when the heat has been turned off on purpose, and in any part that is normally unheated. Aviva’s wording, as a search result quotes it, removes freezing cover once you have been away more than 8 consecutive days in the heating season, unless you used reasonable care to maintain heat or shut off and drained the water system. Desjardins says it does not cover water damage caused by a lack of heating.
Two points sit beside those. Intact’s Ontario policy-change notice, again as a search result quotes it, says you no longer need someone to check your home every four days while you are away. And Kacaba Cottage Care, a Haliburton caretaker, describes the strictest wording it sees as a check inside the dwelling within a window as short as 72 hours. We could not open the full Aviva wording or the Intact notice, so treat both of those as reported, not read by us in full.
The safe reading for an owner: check your policy wording, keep the heat on and have the cottage checked as often as the wording asks, or close it properly with the water off and drained. Aviva’s wording and the brokers we read all present a drained, shut-off system as the alternative to heat and checks.
How often we come
The cadence is yours to choose, within what the drive allows. In the primary ring, which runs from Temagami down to Burk’s Falls and Magnetawan and from Mattawa west to the West Arm of Lake Nipissing, we offer every 72 hours, weekly, every two weeks or monthly. In Kearney, Perry and McMurrich/Monteith the most frequent regular check is monthly. In Huntsville and Lake of Bays we do storm visits but no routine winter cadence. The cadence table on this page shows what each one suits. Per-visit prices are TBD; they will be published on the pricing page.
What a check covers
A check is a walk through the whole cottage, not a look at the laneway. Outside, we go around the building for broken glass, forced doors, tracks, animal damage and anything that has come down from the trees, and we look at the roof from the ground for snow load and ice. Inside, we go room by room: the thermostat and the temperature it is holding, ceilings and walls for stains, floors under sinks and around the water heater, the visible plumbing, the electrical panel, and the sump pit if there is one. If you leave a fridge or freezer running, we open it.
If something is wrong, the report says so first, with photos, and we call you. Small repairs can be done on the visit for Seasons and Host members; anything bigger, or anything that needs a licensed trade, is quoted in writing before work starts.
The photo report
Every visit ends with a report sent to you: dated and timed photos of each room, the thermostat, the main water shut-off as we left it, and anything unusual, with a few lines of notes. Brokers advise owners to keep photos of their shut-off valves, thermostat settings and closing checklists, and a winter of reports is exactly that record, dated visit by visit.
Storm and freeze checks
A schedule protects against slow problems. Weather brings fast ones. As part of the Watch tier we add a visit when the weather puts an empty cottage at risk: high winds or an ice storm that brings trees and lines down, heavy snow on the roof, a power cut on your road, or a cold snap that would freeze the pipes if the heat failed.