Audio Visual Installer Insurance

If there is one claim that defines this trade, it is a large screen leaving a wall, and it is almost always a substrate problem rather than a bracket problem.

Modern displays are large, heavy and mounted flush, often on plasterboard, sometimes on dot-and-dab where the board is not in contact with the masonry behind it, occasionally on a stud wall where the studs are not where the mount needs them. A fixing that would hold comfortably in brick does very little in a cavity, and the failure may be months later when the board finally gives.

The protections are practical. Establish the substrate before quoting, not on installation day. Use fixings appropriate to what is actually behind the board, and where there is nothing suitable, fit a backing plate or a floor-supported mount and charge for it. And record the substrate and the fixing method against the job, with a photograph, because years later that is the only evidence of whether the failure was predictable.

AV is bought for a moment, and the moment is where the commercial exposure sits.

A boardroom that cannot video conference on Monday morning, a lecture theatre that fails in freshers' week, a venue whose system goes down during a wedding, a home cinema that is not ready for a promised date. In each case nothing is damaged and nobody injured, and the client's complaint is about the occasion they have lost. On a commercial contract that can carry real figures, including a client's own penalties.

Whether insurance answers it depends on whether the failure was negligent or simply a failure to deliver on time, and policies differ sharply on that. The reliable protections are contractual and operational: a written scope and commissioning date, change requests signed off as they arise, a commissioning and handover test the client signs, and a realistic position on lead times rather than an optimistic one. Promising a date you cannot control is where this exposure is created.

Smart home and commercial AV has quietly made installers network contractors, and most policies in this trade have not caught up.

Control systems, streaming, cameras, door entry and conferencing all sit on the client's network, and you configure it, hold the credentials and frequently keep remote access so you can support it. That gives you a data exposure, because you can reach devices and sometimes recordings, and it makes you a potential route into a business's systems. A control processor left on default credentials and exposed to the internet is a realistic incident.

Treat it the way a security installer should: change credentials as routine, document what access you retain and why, remove access when a contract ends, and have cyber cover alongside the liability rather than assuming liability reaches it. On commercial work, expect to be asked about it, because the client's own IT function increasingly is.

Most AV businesses sell the equipment as well as fitting it, and that makes them a supplier with a supplier's exposures.

Where you specify and supply, you are responsible for the product being fit for what you said it would do, and a manufacturer's defect arrives as your problem first even if you eventually recover from them. Where you also design the system, a specification that cannot achieve what the client needed is an advisory failure rather than a product one. And where the client supplied the kit and you only installed it, your exposure is much narrower.

All three happen in the same business, often in the same month, which is why the schedule needs to describe supply, design and installation rather than one of them. A policy written as installation only, on a business that specifies and supplies, has priced the smallest part of what you do.

The exposures here are mostly about other people's property and other people's deadlines. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.