We have unique experience with laboratory equipment in a research setting from our training in Engineering Science followed by years of work at the University of Toronto. This has lent itself well to investigating losses involving research equipment. We have experience in investigating the failures of everything from electron microscopes to industrial integrated circuit manufacturing equipment to medical laboratory equipment. Damage from water exposure and power surge, fires, breakdowns and shipping losses are quite familiar.
The equipment is both expensive and precise. Researchers believe in and trust their equipment at a level of faith. The same can be said of precision metal-working machinists. They will have certain pieces of tooling they are incapable of independently verifying and they develop faith in this tooling. If they come to think a piece of equipment they had faith in is unreliable, they will be more inclined to give up on it and seek complete replacement. This is nothing new to an experienced adjuster, but faith and loss of faith in equipment seems to be present in every loss with research equipment.
Research is seldom as well-funded as the researcher's imagination for equipment. Capable and imaginative researchers will often cobble together more advanced systems on a shoe-string budget. When there is a loss, or sometimes just a loss of confidence in the equipment, this can lead to one of the recurring situations in claims with research equipment. The insurer may only discover the reality of the original system after examining a claim for complete replacement with a complete, integrated, turn-key, commercial system.
As complex and expensive as the equipment may be, the cause of loss might be quite familiar: Water, power surge, lightning, fire, smoke, wear and tear, accident and breakdown — even non-losses are possible. In a particular case, the researcher was claiming for the failure of a piece of research equipment. Put in the most simple terms, the system never worked quite as advertized from the time it was received from the manufacturer. Further, instead of improving with time as the salesman suggested it would, it degraded. The root cause of the problem was that the researcher was the victim of salesmanship by an equipment manufacturer. Because the salesman had a PhD, the researcher never considered that the claims of performance might be exaggerated.
Research equipment is rarely produced in large numbers and, with options and customization, is nearly always unique. Modern, manufactured, research equipment is generally a fully integrated system with control computers, data acquisition, instrumentation signal processing and some pretty cool application of fundamental science at the heart of it. Laboratory-built systems are as unique and imaginative as the people involved.