- before
Before the storm: an hour of work, not a day
Clean the condenser on every built-in refrigerator and ice machine in the house. Check gasket compression at four points on each door. Turn the refrigerator and freezer down a step or two so there is thermal margin banked before anything happens. Photograph the model and serial plate on each appliance while the lights are on — that plate is inside a door or behind a grille and it is unreadable by torchlight in a hot kitchen.
- during
During the outage: disconnect once it has already failed
Keep refrigeration doors shut. A well-sealed built-in holds temperature for hours without help. Then, once the power is genuinely out, open the breakers for the refrigeration, the range or wall oven, and the ice machine, or unplug what you can reach. Nothing in a dark house needs to be connected, and everything connected is exposed when the grid returns.
- after
After restoration: wait twenty minutes, then watch
Let the street run for about twenty minutes before you restore anything — early restoration is unstable and it is common to see it drop again. Bring appliances back one at a time. Give refrigeration several hours to pull down before judging it. If a unit hums and cuts out, will not boot, or lights its interface without responding, stop cycling it and have it looked at; repeated restart attempts damage a compressor that is already struggling.
The thing nobody expects
Homeowners prepare for a hurricane by thinking about food. They should be thinking about voltage.
Northeast Florida has three recent events with verifiable figures. Matthew knocked out power for nearly 250,000 metro customers in October 2016. Irma produced the worst Jacksonville flooding in nearly a century in September 2017. Helene took 113,000 JEA customers off the grid in September 2024.
In each case, our call volume did not spike during the outage. It spiked in the week after restoration, and the calls were not about spoiled food. They were about refrigerators that would not restart, ovens with one element dead, ice machines that had gone silent, and control panels that lit up and then ignored every button.
Why restoration is the dangerous moment
An appliance sitting on a dead circuit is doing nothing and cannot be harmed. The harm arrives when a utility re-energises a whole area at once.
Restoration is not a clean switch. Voltage can arrive high, sag under sudden aggregate load, drop out and return, and swing while the system rebalances. That sequence is exactly the kind of event that damages electronics: not one dramatic strike, but repeated transients across a few minutes.
Three things in a modern kitchen are particularly exposed.
Control boards. Every built-in refrigerator, wall oven, dishwasher and ice machine has one. They tend to fail selectively rather than completely — one relay stops closing, one display segment goes dark, one function stops responding — which is why the fault often reads as random.
Inverter compressor drives. Variable-speed compressors are driven by power electronics. That drive is the expensive part of the appliance and it is the part that a surge finds first. A compressor that hums and trips shortly after restoration is very often a drive problem, not a mechanical one.
Anything with a display that stays powered. If a device is showing a clock while the house is dark, it is on a battery or a standby supply, and its logic board is still connected to the circuit.
Surge strips are not the answer people think
A point-of-use surge protector is fine and it is worth having. It is also sized for a fast, high-energy spike, and the restoration event is often a longer sagging and swinging condition that a clamping device does not address at all. A whole-house surge protective device at the panel is a genuine improvement and worth discussing with an electrician. Neither one is as reliable as an open breaker.
What not to do
Do not keep flipping the breaker to see whether the refrigerator will start this time. A compressor that is failing to start draws locked-rotor current every attempt, and every attempt heats the windings further.
Do not run built-in refrigeration off a small generator through an extension cord without knowing the generator’s output quality. Inexpensive non-inverter generators produce a waveform that variable-speed compressor drives handle poorly, and running one for three days can do what the outage did not.
Do not judge a refrigerator in the first hour. A built-in unit that has been off for two days needs several hours to pull down. Empty compartments and hot food in them both extend that.
When to call
Call once power has been stable for a day and something is still wrong: a unit that will not start, an interface that does not respond, an oven element that is dead, a compressor that cycles on and off within a minute, or an ice machine that runs without producing.
The visit is a $129 flat diagnostic, credited toward the repair when you approve the work, with a written estimate before any part is ordered. Sealed-system work is run by an EPA Section 608 certified technician. Genuine OEM parts, 90 days on labor, 365 days on parts.
We are an independent appliance repair company. We schedule appointments Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and Saturday 9am to 4pm — we do not advertise emergency or 24-hour service, and in the week after a storm we would rather tell you honestly when we can be there.
If something is already wrong
You get a written estimate before any part is ordered or any labor begins. Nothing proceeds without your approval.
Northeast Florida Appliance Service is an independent appliance repair company. We are not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by any of the manufacturers named on this site. All brand names and model numbers are the property of their respective owners and are used only to identify the appliances we service.