Home warranty coverage, item by item

Overview

This is the full item directory: one page for every home system, appliance and commonly-excluded item that a buyer is likely to have a question about, each answering the same four questions. Does a home warranty cover it, and on what conditions? What does a home inspector actually look at, and what will the report say? What are the exclusions, caps and pre-existing-condition traps specific to this item? And what should a buyer do about it, before which deadline?

How to read the coverage verdicts

Each page opens with a direct answer in the first two sentences, because most readers want one. The verdicts fall into three groups, and the middle one is by far the largest.

• Routinely covered. The item appears in the grant of coverage in essentially every standard contract — a water heater, a dishwasher, a furnace. Being listed is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it.
• Conditionally covered. The item is listed, but coverage turns on a tier, an add-on, a location, an age, a cap, or a condition the buyer cannot verify without reading the contract. Most of the directory lives here.
• Routinely excluded. The item is outside the product's design — a roof, a foundation, mold, termite damage, most things outside the foundation footprint — and no amount of arguing changes that, because the exclusion is doing exactly what it was drafted to do.

A verdict on this site describes the industry pattern visible in published contracts. It does not describe the reader's contract. Two plans from the same provider — one sold directly, one sold through a real estate transaction — can differ on waiting periods, limits and definitions.

The one idea worth carrying into every page

A home service contract is a grant of coverage followed by a much longer list of exclusions, and the exclusions decide the outcome. The grant is short, readable and reassuring: we will repair or replace covered systems and appliances that fail from normal wear and tear. Everything difficult happens afterwards, in the pages that define what counts as a covered item, what counts as normal wear and tear, what was pre-existing, what was improperly installed, what was inadequately maintained, what is a code upgrade, what is a component versus a system, and what portion of the loss is secondary damage the contract never touches.

This is not a quirk of one company's drafting. It is the shape of the product. The same structure appears in homeowners insurance, where the dwelling coverage is written open-perils — everything is covered unless excluded — so that the exclusion list is the policy. Reading a coverage summary and stopping there tells a buyer almost nothing about what will happen when something breaks.

The practical consequence is that a claim outcome is usually determined long before the claim. It is determined by the age and installation history of the equipment, by what the inspection report said, by whether maintenance was documented, and by which schedule the item sits on. Those are all knowable during the inspection or option period, when the buyer still has leverage, and largely unknowable afterwards.