Dealing with repair insurance adjusters

Recently, my genset would start and keep running only after numerous tries (30 or more sometimes). A check of all the normal stuff turned up nothing, so I called a generator repair tech. The gen. had been run earlier so, of course, it started fine when he got there. We called the insurance company to get authorization, and the tech told him that it may be a choke adjustment, but he couldn't tell until the next morning when the gen. was cold. He also stated that it may be some other component. Next morning he came back, it wouldn't start, and he checked everything and finally found it had a bad "governor controller", as it's called in the Onan manual. Called the insurance adjuster and told him what the problem was, but he denied the claim saying that it wasn't covered. Well, the policy states, among other things, "PC Board", which the governor controller is. Well, no amount of explaining would convince him that it was a PC Board, and he went so far as to refuse to take any more calls from me. It took a call to the president of the company threatening to report it to the Wisconsin Commissioneer of Insurance for them to cough up a reimbursment check.

Moral of the story: Read your insurance contract thoroughly and understand the terminology THEY use to describe parts before telling them what the problem is. They don't (at least my insurance company doesn't) have repair manuals, and if your tech says "light bulb" (what the repair manual calls it) and the insurance calls it an "electrical incandescent illumination device", you may run into the same stone-walling and out-of-pocket expenses I did. Yes, I got my money back, but you needn't have to jump thru the same hoops I did.  'nuff said.

If you get a service company that is used to dealing with the warranty people, it saves a lot of time and trouble.  Bondurant Mobile RV Service in Sierra Vista is very good at it.