What roughly 68 thunderstorm days a year does to electronics

The seasonal pattern in our call log

Between June and September the mix of work changes. Mechanical faults stay roughly constant; electronic ones climb. Jacksonville averages somewhere around 68 thunderstorm days a year, and most of them land in that window.

That does not mean lightning is striking kitchens. Direct strikes are rare and they are unmistakable — scorched traces, a failed board and usually damage somewhere else in the house at the same time. What we actually see is the slower version.

How surge damage really accumulates

Every nearby strike, every utility switching event, every time a large motor in the house starts, puts a transient on the supply. Most are small. Modern appliance power supplies absorb them using components designed to clamp voltage spikes, and those components degrade a little each time they do their job.

After enough of them, the protection is worn out, and the next ordinary transient reaches something that cannot tolerate it. The failure then looks random and arrives on a clear day, which is why the connection to storm season is easy to miss.

The symptoms that suggest electronics

Some faults point at a board strongly enough that we look there first.

An appliance that is completely dead with no display and no relay click, where the outlet or circuit tests fine.

A control that powers up but ignores one specific function — a dishwasher that runs but never heats, an oven whose broil element works and whose bake element never energises, a cooktop where one zone is unresponsive and the rest are normal. A single failed output driver does exactly this.

A display with missing segments, scrambled characters, or a touch panel that registers presses in the wrong place.

An appliance that resets itself mid-cycle and starts over.

Communication faults between boards in an appliance that has more than one — often visible as an interface that lights up and then goes blank when it fails to hear back from the power board.

The symptoms that do not

Plenty of complaints get blamed on “the storm last week” and are mechanical.

An oven that runs cool is far more often a drifted cavity sensor, a failed bake element or a door that no longer seals than it is a control fault. A dishwasher that will not start is usually a door latch or a spring that has lost tension under a heavy custom panel. A cooktop that shuts itself down after a minute at high power is usually thermal — a blocked cooling path or a supply that sags — not a dead inverter.

Boards are expensive. We measure before we quote one, every time.

Where protection is worth fitting

Whole-house surge protection at the panel is the option that actually helps a built-in appliance, because a built-in is hard-wired or plugged into an outlet you cannot reach behind a cabinet. It is inexpensive relative to a single control board and it protects everything at once.

Point-of-use strips are fine for what you can plug in. They do nothing for the wall oven.

Two habits also help. If a storm has already taken the power out, switch major appliances off at the breaker until it is properly back — the messy part of an outage is often the restoration, not the interruption. And if the house sits empty for stretches, as many on this coast do, consider leaving non-essential appliances off at the breaker.

What we do with a suspected board

We confirm supply voltage at the appliance, check the harness and connectors for corrosion — a real factor in salt air, and a common cause of what looks like a board fault — and test the outputs the complaint points at. Only then does a board get quoted, in writing, before anything is ordered.