After the power comes back

This part of Florida sees roughly sixty-eight thunderstorm days a year, and the coast has sat through multi-day outages more than once in recent memory — Matthew in 2016, Irma in 2017, Helene in 2024. The appliance calls that follow a storm season are rarely about the storm, because almost nobody connects the two. The kitchen worked when the power came back. It stopped working a month later.

That gap is the useful thing to understand, because it changes what is worth testing first.

What a power event actually does

Two separate things happen to an appliance when supply is lost and restored, and they damage different parts.

The first is the transient. A surge or a sag on restoration puts stress on the low-voltage side of a control board — the power supply section, the relays and the electrolytic capacitors that smooth it. That stress does not always destroy anything outright. A capacitor that has been cooked runs on, degraded, and fails progressively. The symptom when it arrives is not a dead appliance; it is a display that blanks intermittently, one key on a touch panel that stops responding, a setting the machine no longer remembers overnight, or an oven that ignores a programmed shutoff.

The second is the restart. Refrigeration that stops with a warm cabinet has to restart against a system that has not equalised, and it may restart into a house that is already hot. Compressors and their inverters are the part of the machine that notices. A unit that came back on and held temperature all through the autumn can still be the same unit that never quite recovered its capacity, and the complaint six weeks later is a cabinet that runs three or four degrees warm and a compressor that no longer cycles off.

Neither of these presents as storm damage. Both of them are.

What to do on the day supply returns

Go and listen to every refrigeration unit in the house. The main refrigerator, the wine cabinet, the beverage unit in the bar, the undercounter one outside, and anything in a garage. A unit that has tripped its own overload on restart and not retried is completely silent, and silence in a house full of people finding their footing after an outage goes unnoticed for days.

Check the breaker for each built-in individually. Built-in appliances are normally on their own dedicated circuits, so one tripped breaker takes out exactly one machine and leaves the rest of the kitchen looking healthy.

Give an oven or a cooktop a short test run rather than assuming. It is better to find a control that has lost its clock or an igniter that no longer lights on the first evening than on the first evening you have people over.

Write the date down. That is the single most useful thing you can do for whoever eventually looks at the appliance.

What to tell us when you call

Say there was an outage, and say roughly when. It is not a formality. If a control board is suspected, knowing that the appliance sat through a power event moves the board up the order of testing rather than leaving it as the expensive guess of last resort. If refrigeration is running warm, knowing the unit restarted into a hot house tells us to take capacity measurements seriously instead of assuming a defrost fault, which is the far more common cause in a machine that has had an ordinary year.

It also affects what we bring. A control board for a specific serial range is not a van part, and if the symptom pattern points that way from the phone call we would rather have it ordered before the visit than after it.

What is worth doing about it

Honestly: not much, at the appliance. Individual point-of-use surge protectors do something for plug-in equipment, but a built-in on a dedicated circuit is not usually plugged into anything you can reach, and the meaningful protection is whole-house, at the panel, fitted by an electrician. That is outside what we do and we have no interest in selling it. We mention it for one reason: if you have lost more than one control board in a house, the second one was not bad luck, and the conversation worth having is with an electrician rather than with us.

The rest is triage. Storm damage is not preventable at the kitchen. It is survivable if you find it early, which is why the walk around the house on the day the lights come back is worth the ten minutes it takes.