When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions of Houston homes for the better part of a week in July 2024, the heat did what it always does. Freezers thawed, refrigerators went warm, and the food spoiled. Almost immediately, the calls and the posts started. File a claim for your food. Get your money.

We were living it at the same time. Our home in Humble was less than 10 years old, and the power was still out for well over a week. Trees were down through the neighborhood. We had just installed a generator, and I learned fast that owning one and knowing how to run it through a long outage are not the same thing. You have to manage the hours, the oil, the heat, and the people depending on it.

My grandmother was still in Clear Lake, and she stayed with us until her power came back. We checked the Whataburger app because it told us more about restored power than the outage map did. At the office, we had hundreds of claim questions, and every time more than two clients asked the same thing, I posted the answer. I even sent clients photos of my own back fence and explained why my 2 percent deductible made a fence claim the wrong move for me, even though the damage was real.

I watched a lot of good families spend that same hard week chasing a check that was never coming. Not because anyone was cheating them, but because no one had told them what their policy actually does after the power goes out. So let me tell you plainly, the way I would tell my own neighbor.

Food spoilage, the claim everyone files and few collect

Here is the truth about food after an outage. Per the Texas Department of Insurance, a homeowners or renters policy may cover food that spoils because of a power outage, but usually only up to about 500 dollars, and only under specific conditions in the policy. Your utility cannot fill the gap either. Under its tariff, CenterPoint does not reimburse customers for food or other losses from an outage, which is why it points people back to their insurance.

The catch is your deductible. On most Houston homeowners policies the deductible sits well above 500 dollars, often a thousand or several thousand. When the food loss is smaller than the deductible, the claim pays nothing, even though the loss is technically covered. After Beryl, in our own office, we watched more than half of the food spoilage claims people filed pay out nothing at all.

None of that means insurance failed. It means a freezer of groceries is usually a deductible sized loss, not an insurance sized one. Knowing that before you file saves you the time, the paperwork, and the disappointment.

Power surges, electronics, and your air conditioner

The real money after an outage is usually not the food, it is what the power does when it comes back. A surge can hit when service is restored, or when a line goes down in a storm, and it can ruin electronics, appliances, and the control board in your air conditioner.

Whether your policy pays comes back to the cause. If the surge comes from a covered event, like lightning or a downed power line in a storm, your homeowners policy generally covers the damaged items. Electronics and appliances fall under your personal property coverage, and built in systems like the furnace or the air conditioner fall under your dwelling coverage, up to your limits and minus your deductible. What is usually not covered is damage from gradual voltage problems on the grid, from overloading your own circuits, or from equipment that simply wore out, which falls under the maintenance exclusion every policy carries.

Two more things are worth knowing. Standard policies often put a low per item limit on electronics, and an air conditioner that fails from age is never a covered claim. The fix for both is a small add on called equipment breakdown coverage. It covers the sudden mechanical and electrical breakdown of your appliances, electronics, and HVAC, usually with no per item limit and a lower deductible, and for most Houston homes it costs very little. If you run heavy air conditioning all summer, it is one of the smartest few dollars a month you can spend.

Before you file, two things worth a minute

After an outage, the instinct is to file for everything and sort it out later. Two truths argue for slowing down.

First, a claim can cost more than it pays. Every claim you file lands on your claims history, the CLUE report that carriers check at renewal, even one that is denied or pays you nothing. In Texas, the Department of Insurance notes that three or more claims that are not weather related within three years can put your policy at risk of nonrenewal, with a required warning after two. Texas does limit how weather related claims count against you, but you do not control how a carrier codes a claim, and the last thing you want is to trade a few hundred dollars of food for a mark that follows you for years. Before filing a small claim, take one honest look at whether it clears your deductible and whether it helps you or quietly hurts you.

Second, insurance and disaster aid are not the same tool, and it matters which one you reach for. Insurance is the contract you pay for, to cover sudden and accidental damage. Federal disaster aid is a finite, needs based safety net for people who have nowhere else to turn. That same summer, while Houston dealt with Beryl, Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, and federal officials warned that the disaster relief fund could run out before the season was over.

This is what we mean when we say we read the contract before claim time. About 40 percent of the time we tell families they are already in good shape. The rest of the time, we would rather help you file the right claim, with the right company, than watch you lose a week to the wrong one.