Tank sitter services (Calgary)

[sphelps]

Originally Posted by Myka

When you guys are looking for tank sitters be sure to check that they are bonded and insured (ask was their limit is). That way if they do something dumb and burn your house down or leave the door open and thugs steal your ginch then it will be covered.

I prefer to use a maintenance company because they (should) know what to do in a tank emergency, but also because of the insurance. If your friend did something dumb and burned your house down or got busted sniffing your ginch then your relationship may become a bit stressed!

While partially true and good advice you will have a hard time finding a person with such insurance. Most these guys are not likely to even have business licenses and getting proper liability insurance and everything else you need isn't that easy and pretty expensive, it would only make sense if it was a full time business with decent revenue.

In all reality it's also not really required, home insurance requires that someone checks on the residence every so often and you don't need any special maintenance company to preform such task. So provided the person watching your tank was in agreement to be acting as a someone trusted to preform this task which may also include some tank maintenance stuff you will be covered even if the person does cause damage.

However if the person is acting as an official contractor then yes they must be setup appropriately but more for their benefit and not yours. Your home insurance is still likely to get the bill no matter what as proving the cause of failure a result of the contractor will be difficult, the contractors insurance really only acts as a team of lawyers to save the contractor the trouble of dealing with a lawsuit.

I know this because I was a contractor who did maintenance type work among other things and I did have the insurance and an incident with significant damages. Basically all my insurance did was tell the other insurance company to **** off. When it comes right down to it I wasn't liable unless I agreed in writing otherwise which even then isn't a guaranty unless perhaps it's notarized.