House insurance - reporting incident

hello, I’m hoping that this is the right forum. Recently there’s been the odd break in to sheds around the county, and the community alert WhatsApp has encouraged everyone to report anything to Gardaí.

Last week, the shed was broken into, and a strimmer taken and the lock damaged. I told the gard that came out that I wasn’t expecting to get anything back, I wasn’t fussed about the lock on the door as we don’t use it, and have always and can still lock it from the inside. It cannot be opened from outside now, even though damaged. The value of the strimmer is not really worth loosing sleep over. He also mentioned that it was likely random people passing, as absolutely nothing similar reported anywhere local of a similar nature.

His advice was categorically to ring the house insurance company, and see advice because they may fix the lock for free, and that I would ask about the excess and replacing the strimmer.

So, I rang them today to enquire. It became clear that between the excess, and loosing my mo clams discount and taking a number of years for it to build back up, I would be down around €900. That’s assuming the premium doesn’t change. This is 4 times the value of the strimmer. I said thank you, I don’t wish to do anything about this only enquire about the costs etc.

This evening I got a formal email with PDF document with details of my incident report, and that I was choosing not to claim. A quick google search informs me that this will likely effect my premium next year.

Have I completely messed up herein following the advice of the gard and making enquiries, have the insurance company just found a way to charge me more next year? Or can they use this against me? I’m really kicking myself over this.

Many thanks.