Storm season checklist

Northeast Florida averages around 68 thunderstorm days a year. That is not a marketing statistic; it is the reason a disproportionate share of the control boards we replace fail between June and September, and the reason we run a specific checklist on any appliance whose trouble started with a storm.

What actually kills a board

Direct strikes are rare and dramatic. What is common is far less exciting: a voltage transient induced on the supply by a nearby strike, or by the utility switching the circuit back after an outage. Modern appliance controls run low-voltage logic behind a power supply, and that supply is where transients land. The failure is usually the supply section rather than the processor, which is why a board can go completely dead while every mechanical part of the appliance is perfect.

The second, quieter killer is the restart itself. A compressor asked to start against a system that has not equalised draws heavy current, and repeated attempts during a flickering restoration are harder on a start component than one clean start ever is.

After the power comes back

Work through this before concluding anything is broken.

1. Wait. Give a refrigerator a full 24 hours before judging its temperature. It has to remove all the heat that entered while it was off.
2. Expect the restart delay. Many controls hold the compressor off for three to five minutes after power is restored to let pressures equalise. A refrigerator that is silent for a few minutes is behaving correctly.
3. Check the breaker, then check it properly. A breaker that has tripped may not look tripped. Switch it fully off and back on.
4. Look for a control lockout. Some appliances enter a fault or demo state after an abnormal shutdown and need a deliberate reset rather than a repair.
5. Measure, do not guess, on the refrigerator. Thermometer in a glass of water, mid-shelf, four hours. Food that spent an extended period above 40°F is a food-safety decision, not an appliance decision.
6. Listen at the condenser. A compressor attempting to start and dropping out on its overload every few minutes has a distinctive rhythm — a click, a hum, silence, repeat. Stop and call rather than letting it cycle for days.
7. Check the ice machine’s drain and bin. A machine that sat warm for a day has melted its bin, and standing water is the first thing to clear.

What we can and cannot repair

Control boards are replaced, not repaired at the component level, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can do is establish that the board is genuinely the fault before you buy one, because a dead appliance after a storm is not automatically a dead board — a tripped thermal cutoff, a failed relay, an open fuse on the board itself, or a supply problem in the house all present the same way.

On an older appliance with an expensive board, that diagnosis is worth doing carefully. A board is often the single most expensive part in the machine, and replacing one on a unit that has already had two other failures deserves a frank conversation about the remaining life of everything around it.

Prevention that is actually worth doing

Whole-home surge protection at the panel is the only measure that addresses hard-wired appliances — a plug-in strip cannot protect a range or a built-in oven that has no plug you can reach. It is electrical work for a licensed electrician, not something we install, and we have nothing to sell you on it. Point-of-use protection is still worthwhile for anything that does plug in, including undercounter refrigeration and ice machines.

The other prevention is unglamorous and free: if a storm is forecast and you are going to be away, there is no harm in letting a plumbed ice machine finish its cycle and switching it off at the breaker. It is the appliance most likely to make a mess if it fails mid-cycle while nobody is home.

Not every summer fault is a storm fault

Appliance complaints cluster in the same months as thunderstorms, and most of them are unrelated to the weather on the day they are reported. Summer is simply when a kitchen asks for everything its equipment can produce, and when the ambient temperature around a condenser is at its highest. A refrigerator with a fouled condenser or a slowing condenser fan holds temperature comfortably in March and runs out of margin in August; an ice machine that has been losing a little output every month is only noticed when the household finally needs a full bin.

The question that separates the two is the shape of the decline, not the date. Output that fell away gradually over months points at heat load, air path and maintenance. Output that stopped in a single evening, or an appliance that is completely dead, points at the electrical side — and if that evening had a storm in it, start with the board and the supply.