Page 576 - Demo

Fools%u2019 Journey570Lynn and I felt fortunate when our electricity was finally turned on, because many other households were without power for several days longer than we were. Still, we used up our back-up battery fairly quickly, which left us only with our flashlights and batterypowered radio.By the time our electricity was restored, everything in our sideby-side refrigerator/freezer had completely thawed and spoiled. Because we%u2019d stocked up at the grocery store only a few days earlier, it had been full of food. Now it was full of garbage. I called our Safeco insurance agent, and was pleased to learn that our policy would cover the loss %u2014 but only some of it. Lynn and I made an itemized list of the spoiled items, photographed it all, then submitted a claim for $1,005. There was a $100 deductible, and a $500 limit on the coverage, so we received a check for $500. Fortunately, our home suffered no wind damage while many other houses did. Yet, despite our having only a small claim, Safeco boosted our homeowner%u2019s insurance premium by 50%. Needless to say, we weren%u2019t pleased with the increase, so we began calling other companies, and ended up switching to Allstate, where we received similar coverage at a considerably reduced premium. In fact, our new Allstate insurance (home and auto) was quite a bit cheaper than what we%u2019d been paying Safeco even before their rate increase. Now that we had reasonably priced insurance, we wondered if Allstate would also raise our rates if we had a claim for spoiled food in the future. So, after some online research, we bought a highercapacity back-up battery that was powerful enough to keep our refrigerator operating for a full 24 hours. In fact, we bought two of them %u2014 along with a solar-panel charging system. And we paid for most of it with the savings we realized by switching to Allstate. We%u2019d considered buying a whole-house backup generator, which would have supplied electricity for our entire home, but decided against one. A family down the road from us had one, and I%u2019d ridden by it on my bike during an outage, but was surprised at how noisy it was. Plus, all generators operated with internal combustion engines, powered by propane or gasoline, which would surround our house with exhaust gases, something Lynn wouldn%u2019t