Something doesn’t add up.
You said you lived in a community with “100% volunteer FD and my fire insurance was cheap.”
Then you said that the difference was $100/year.
According to the DPG linked above, your community would have had a DPG of 4. i.e.: everything a “3A or 3B” would have had, but “100% volunteer FD” means no professionals at all, right? So that would put you at a 4 (meets all the DPG 3B criteria, except one).
The difference between a DPG of 1 and 4 is not $100/year, UNLESS, you were insuring something for $10,000 or so.
According to the Fire Underwriter’s Survey, here’s an average of 4 insurance quotes for British Columbia, on a sample property (built 1980, 1000sq ft, 3bdrm, 2 baths, $125,000).
This is the average of 4 different insurance companies:
Scenario 1: DPG 1 (3 full-time firefighters 24/7): $450/year
Scenario 2: DPG 2 (1 full-time firefighter 24/7, and a chief, rest auxiliary): $736/year
Scenario 3: DPG 3 (1 full-time professional chief-not on duty, rest auxiliary): $1,396/year
(numbers taken from a FUS presentation to BC municipalities, I’ll send it to you if you’d like, or you can google it.)
So even in the best case scenario of DPG 3, you’re talking more than triple the insurance rates. But like you said, you lived in a community with “100% volunteer FD” – so that’s DPG 4 (since there’s no professional chief). So your rates would have been even higher than just triple.
So here’s what I’m thinking: you weren’t living in a community with “100% volunteer FD”. You were in a community that had professional firefighers, and you didn’t know it. (ie: they had one professional on at all times, or had a professional chief). Or you were covered by another professional department, and you didn’t know it. Or some other mistake like that. No reason to think that you’re just making up stuff.
The bottom line is that anything less than 3 full-time firefighters on duty 24/7, and your insurance rates will be significantly higher. There’s no arguing that.