CHEYENNE - Gordon Gunsch of Lander says his insurance company counted as a claim an inquiry by his wife concerning whether their policy covered cleaning up soot buildup from his hot water heater.

Gunsch said he his wife cleaned the soot from the walls of his house and never filed a claim with State Farm Insurance Company.

Gunsch said he filed two claims in more than 20 years with State Farm which - coupled with the inquiry about the soot - caused him to lose his homeowner' insurance.

One of his claims was for hail damage, which paid about $1,200. A second was for water damage that happened when a "frost-proof" outside faucet froze. The company paid $3,000 on the second claim.

After the water damage claim, State Farm said, "We're going to drop you," Gunsch said in a telephone interview.

He said he now is looking at buying homeowner's insurance from Lloyd's of London for about $80 per month, or double the $40 per month cost with State Farm.

Gunsch contacted Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, to ask for some better legal definition of an insurance claim.

"Our Legislature needs to start looking at how these companies do business," he said.

Case said he has been getting other complaints about State Farm from longtime customers who said their insurance wasn't renewed after they filed claims for weather-related or "acts of God" damages.

The companies, he said, are wary of water damage claims because of the toxic mold scare.

"People now are afraid to turn in legitimate claims," Case said. 'We need to look at this."

Case is a member of the Joint Interim Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions that has been assigned homeowner insurance as an interim study.

Wyoming Insurance Commissioner Ken Vines said his agency began getting complaints last year from homeowners who said their insurance companies were not renewing their policies because they filed one claim for wind or hail damages.

"I don't feel that's appropriate," Vines said. "If you're selling homeowners insurance in Wyoming, you got to know you're going to have wind and hail claims."

"It's not anything the homeowner has any control over that's the fault of the policy holder. It's a natural event," he added.

Vines said that, in fairness to the companies, his staff often found the homeowner had filed more than one claim when they checked the complaints.

Vines said he will have information on the number and type of complaints filed with his department for the next meeting of the legislative interim committee.

Most prevalent, he said, are complaints from real estate agents and homeowners about problems getting insurance coverage after a house has had water damage.

The company either won't underwrite the home or is charging a high premium for providing coverage if there has been a water damage claim in the past five years, he said.

"The insurance companies are paranoid about this mold issue," Vines said, because the industry has been hit with big jury verdicts for toxic mold in Texas and other parts of the country.

Nationally, homeowner insurance has been a "hard market" recently, meaning the companies are more picky on who they will insure.

Since the state has a lot of companies writing homeowner insurance, customers should shop around, he said.

"I don't think we're in a crisis situation with homeowner's insurance," Vines said.

Sean Slater of State Farm's fire division in Greeley, Colo., said that nonrenewals in Wyoming over the last two years represented fewer than 1 percent of the 30,000 homes insured by State Farm here.

Slater said the company feels it is in compliance with Wyoming state law and regulations when it refuses to renew a homeowner's policy.

"A decision not to renew is not taken lightly," he said Thursday in a telephone interview."We look at losses and policyholders' history with us, Frankly we're in business. We do have to make a profit."

State Farm, he said, has no plans to withdraw from the homeowner insurance market in Wyoming.

"We want to continue, but we need to make a reasonable return," he said.

Slater added that the company does not want to keep increasing rates. For every customer who complains about nonrenewal, three to four gripe about higher homeowner's insurance rates, he said.

Many losses or large losses by some policyholders drive up rates for other customers, he said.

The average State Farm homeowner insurance customer filed one claim in seven to eight years for losses from other than wind or hail damage, he said.

Although water damage losses are pretty significant in the state, they are caused by ruptured washing machine hoses, sprinkler systems and water heaters rather than from floods, he said.

Toxic mold, he said, is not a big issue in Wyoming.

Slater said one way to reduce the cost of the insurance is for homeowners to take the highest deductible they can afford and take care of small losses themselves.

The basic purpose of insurance, he said, is to cover catastrophic losses.