Battery storage at village halls - check with insurer
17th January 2024
Have you told your insurer about improvements at your hall? Make contact before work starts so you can budget for and factor in any additional requirements, and ensure you're covered for the duration of works and for the changes made. This is particularly important for solar PV, batteries and EV car charge points.
Battery storage is now often an integral part of village hall plans to install solar PV, or to add to an existing system, ensuring maximum use of the free renewable energy at source.
But some halls have been caught out by not checking first whether their plans meet their insurer's requirements. Your insurer needs to be made aware in advance of any building work at the hall, both to check your cover for whilst the work is carried out and also for the resulting changes to the building and equipment.
If you've already started or completed such a project at your hall, please contact your insurer to discuss the details and check you're covered.
A recent query to Norris and Fisher, an experienced village hall insurance broker and ACRE sponsor, received the following response:
“Because energy efficiency installations are still a relatively new thing, insurers tend to be dealing with the referrals on a case by case basis. This means that many of them don't yet have a ‘standard response’ which may be where some halls are facing challenges. We are finding that insurers are mainly interested in risk factors such as the value, number of panels/batteries and where the batteries are being stored within the premises. An example of one insurers requirements is that batteries must have a 60 minute fireproof enclosure and a level 2 fire detection system in place.
As insurers are still asking for lots of information in respect of the installations, we would strongly recommend that committee's speak to their insurer and/or broker before proceeding with any installation to ensure that they meet with their requirements. We are seeing more and more enquiries from halls where installation has already taken place and insurers are not happy with what is in place/what's being done to mitigate the risk, which can be stressful and sometimes costly for the hall to rectify"