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Hurricane · Hurricane season
Hurricane outages: the damage comes back with the power
A multi-day outage rarely kills an appliance. The coordinated restoration that ends it does, and there is a simple habit that prevents most of it.
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Humidity · Summer
Humidity, condensation and door gaskets
A gasket that has taken a set leaks warm humid air continuously. Everything else that goes wrong with the refrigerator follows from that.
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Heat · Summer
Summer heat load, and the condensers that give up
Refrigeration does not make cold, it moves heat. From June onward there is nowhere cool to put it, and the appliance with a loaded condenser is the one that fails.
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Salt air · Year-round
Salt air and coastal appliance corrosion
Chloride does not tarnish stainless evenly, it pits it locally. On the coast that mechanism sets the whole maintenance schedule.
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Thunderstorm · Summer
Thunderstorm season and appliance control boards
Boards rarely die outright from a storm. They die selectively, one function at a time, which is why the fault reads as random.
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The one habit worth adopting
If you take nothing else from these pages: once the power has already failed, open the breaker on your built-in refrigeration and your wall oven, and restore it manually about twenty minutes after the street comes back. Matthew, Irma and Helene each produced a wave of repair calls in the week after restoration rather than during the outage. That single habit prevents most of them.