Contractors Equipment Insurance for Restoration & Radon Contractors

Contractors equipment is the coverage that answers a loss to your own gear. Not the harm your work can do to a building or the people in it — that is general liability — and not the customers’ belongings you are holding — that is bailees coverage. This is first-party property coverage on the equipment your business owns and moves from job to job: a loss to the fleet itself, whether it is damaged, destroyed, or stolen. For a restoration or radon operation, that fleet is not a nice-to-have on the balance sheet; it is the thing that lets you do the work at all, and it spends most of its life somewhere other than your yard.

That last point is what makes this line specific to how you work. A restoration contractor’s equipment does not sit in a locked shop waiting for a job — it is deployed at the loss, on a property the business does not own and cannot control, for as long as the drying or the mitigation takes. This page covers what contractors equipment answers, why the deployed-and-in-transit exposure is the heart of it, the theft-from-site reality this trade lives with, how owned and rented gear are treated, and the ownership line that separates your equipment from the contents in your care.

The drying fleet lives at the loss, not in your yard

Picture what a restoration business actually owns and where it keeps it. The fleet is dehumidifiers, air movers, air scrubbers, generators, moisture meters, extractors, and the pumps and hoses that run with them — and on a live job, almost none of it is at the shop. It is standing in a flooded basement, a fire-damaged living room, or a commercial space that has to keep drying around the clock, often for days and sometimes for weeks. The equipment is running unattended overnight, on a property that is occupied, damaged, and open while the work is underway. A radon operation runs the same pattern in a different shape: mitigation fans, sub-slab tooling, drills, and testing devices moving across a site over several visits.

A fixed-location property policy — the kind that covers a building and its contents at an address — does not follow gear out to a loss site, because the whole idea of that policy is a fixed place. Contractors equipment is written the other way around: it is mobile by design, following the equipment at the yard, in the truck, and standing at the job. For a trade whose equipment spends its working life off-premises, that mobility is not a rider; it is the point.

In transit, deployed, and stored: the three places gear is at risk

The exposure lives in three places, and a contractors equipment policy is built to answer all of them. In transit: the gear rides between the yard and the loss, and between one job and the next, where it can be damaged loading, unloading, or on the road — the equipment’s own exposure, distinct from the vehicle that carries it, which is a commercial auto matter. Deployed at the loss: the fleet is at work on a site you do not control, exposed to further water, a fire that reignites, a structure that shifts, or simple mishandling on a busy job. And stored between jobs: back at the yard or a storage facility, where a fire, a theft, or weather can take out a large part of an operation’s working capital at once.

The reason to name all three is that a loss at any of them stops the work. A restoration business that loses its drying fleet cannot respond to the next call, and in a trade where the next call often comes the day after a storm, the equipment is the operation. Covering the gear where it actually sits — mostly off-premises, mostly in motion — is what keeps a single bad night from becoming a business interruption.

Theft from the site: the loss this trade lives with

Theft is one of the most common contractors-equipment losses in restoration and radon work, and it follows directly from how the gear is used. This is valuable, portable equipment left on an open property — a dehumidifier and an air scrubber running overnight in a house nobody is living in, a generator staged on an exterior, a set of fans waiting for the next room. The equipment is built to be moved, which is exactly what makes it easy to move off the job by someone who should not. Add the reality that a loss site is frequently unoccupied and unsecured while the work runs, and theft stops being an edge case.

Contractors equipment answers theft and vandalism of your owned gear, on the job and off it, subject to the terms of the form. Because the deployed-and-unattended pattern is the norm rather than the exception in this trade, how the policy treats off-premises and unattended equipment is worth reading closely — the conditions, any requirements around securing the gear, and how a site loss is handled. That is a conversation to have when the policy is written, not a surprise to discover when a fleet goes missing from a job overnight.

Owned and rented: covering the fleet as you actually deploy it

Owned equipment is the core of the coverage, and for most operations it is the bulk of the fleet. But a large loss can outrun your own inventory. A serious catastrophe response — a neighborhood after a storm, a large commercial water loss — can call for more dehumidifiers and air movers than any single operation keeps on hand, and the honest answer is often rented equipment to fill the gap. When you rent, the rental agreement frequently makes you responsible for the gear while it is in your possession, which is a real exposure even though you do not own the equipment.

Many contractors equipment forms can extend to rented or borrowed equipment in your care, but whether yours does, and to what limit, depends on the form and the endorsements attached. We treat it as a qualitative question read against how your business actually staffs a busy stretch: if your model leans on rentals when the calls stack up, the coverage should follow the way you deploy rather than assume an owned-only default is enough. The goal is that a loss to a fleet that is part-owned and part-rented is answered as one working fleet, not split into a covered half and an uncovered one.

The ownership line: your gear versus their contents

The seam that matters most on this page is the one between your equipment and the property you are holding for a customer, because both of them are mobile and both sit off your premises — which is exactly why they get confused. When your crew packs out a customer’s furniture, electronics, textiles, and documents and moves them to a storage facility or carries them in the truck, those goods are not yours. They are in your care, custody, and control, and they are answered by bailees coverage, the line written for property that belongs to someone else but is your responsibility while it is in your hands.

Your dehumidifiers, air movers, air scrubbers, generators, and radon fans are a different thing entirely: they are yours, and a loss to them is a first-party contractors equipment claim. The line is ownership. Your gear that travels is contractors equipment; their property that travels is bailees coverage. The two ride the same truck to the same loss and stand on the same site you do not control, but they are answered by two different policies because one is your property and the other is your charge. Getting that line right is what keeps a pack-out loss and an equipment loss from being quoted as if they were the same exposure.

Why Restoration Guard Insurance

We are an independent agency that writes one world — restoration and radon mitigation — and we place coverage with insurance carriers that actually want the work. That focus is what lets us schedule and rate a contractors equipment policy around how your fleet is actually used rather than around a generic tools-and-equipment default. We know to ask how much of your fleet is deployed at once during a busy stretch, how far your work travels, how you staff a large loss when your owned inventory runs short, and how your gear is secured on an open site — before we market it. And we draw the ownership line cleanly, so your equipment sits in contractors equipment and the customers’ contents sit in bailees coverage, each answered by the line built for it. Start with a quote, or talk it through with us first.