A puddle appeared on the kitchen floor twice a week. He traced it back to the ice maker fill tube freezing over, warmed and reseated the tube and adjusted the fill. It needed a return trip to settle, but no more puddles.
Gustave R.
power
Storm Season and Control Boards
Control boards in this county usually die of cumulative surge damage, not of one strike. That changes both the diagnosis and what is worth doing about it.
Published July 8, 2026
Power
Boards rarely die in the storm you remember. They die weeks later, from the surges before it, and the meter is what tells them apart.
Book a visit
(904) 442-8210Flat $80 diagnostic, credited toward the repair when you approve the work.
Related service
The area averages roughly 68 thunderstorm days a year. People reasonably assume that means appliances die in dramatic strikes, and occasionally one does. Far more often, what we find is a board that has been degraded gradually by hundreds of small events, none of which was noticeable at the time.
What a surge actually does
A transient over-voltage lasting microseconds does not usually punch a hole in anything. It stresses the components that sit closest to the incoming supply: the surge suppression device on the board, the rectifier, and the electrolytic capacitors in the low-voltage supply. Each event takes a little capacity out of the suppressor and a little life out of the capacitors’ electrolyte.
The result is an appliance that works fine for years and then develops symptoms that make no sense: a display that flickers, a relay that clicks but does not close, a cycle that aborts at a different point each time, a machine that comes back to life after being unplugged for an hour. Those are the signatures of a low-voltage supply that has lost its margin, not of a component that failed cleanly.
Why it shows up in late summer
Two things stack in August and September. The storm frequency peaks, and so does the load — compressors run longer, cooling fans run constantly, and the ambient temperature inside a cabinet or a control compartment is at its annual maximum. Capacitors lose capacity faster when they are hot, and a board that had just enough margin in March does not have it in September.
That is why a board failure in early autumn usually has no single event behind it, and why asking a homeowner “was there a storm?” rarely produces a useful answer. There was. There were sixty of them.
Diagnosing it honestly
A board is the most expensive part in most appliances and the easiest to blame, so we make it prove itself. Before we condemn one we check the supply voltage under load at the appliance, not at the panel — a shared circuit sagging under a compressor start looks exactly like a failing board. We check the ground. We check connector pins for corrosion, which in coastal houses causes the same intermittent behaviour for a fraction of the cost. And we check that the control compartment’s cooling fan is actually running, because a board cooked by its own enclosure is a fan repair wearing a board’s symptoms.
Only when those come back clean is the board the answer.
What is worth doing
Whole-house surge protection at the panel. This is the one intervention that changes the odds, because it clamps the transients before they reach any appliance. It is electrician work, not appliance work, and it protects the kitchen far better than individual outlet strips — most built-in appliances are hard-wired or plugged into an outlet nobody can reach anyway.
A point-of-use protector where the appliance is plugged in and reachable. Second best, and still worthwhile for a coffee system or a countertop unit.
Do not leave a built-in unplugged through a storm and forget it. We have been called out to refrigerators that were fine and had been switched off at the breaker three days earlier.
The part we cannot promise
Surge protection reduces risk; it does not eliminate it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does reliably is convert a population of boards that fail in year eight into a population that fails in year fifteen, which in a built-in kitchen is the difference between one replacement and none.
Price bands
What does the repair behind this note cost?
Completed work, parts and labor together. Most of what we do on this page lands between $430 and $1,090; the $80 visit comes off that once you approve the repair.
| What gets replaced | Parts and labor |
|---|---|
| Control board or touch panel | $430–$1,090 |
Before any of that
$80
Flat $80 diagnostic covering the visit and the full diagnostic sequence, credited toward the repair once you approve the work.
You get a written estimate before any part is ordered or any labor is billed.
Follow-up questions
What does this note leave people asking?
- Can a control board fail weeks after the storm that damaged it?
- That is the usual pattern here. Boards in this county mostly die of cumulative damage rather than of one strike, so the failure arrives with nothing obvious to blame and the event that started it is already forgotten. Around sixty-eight thunderstorm days a year is the background this happens against.
- Is a surge protector worth fitting to a built-in appliance?
- For anything with a board in it, yes, and it costs less than the board does. What it cannot do is undo damage already accumulated, so fitting one to an appliance that is already behaving oddly buys nothing. Fit it while the appliance is healthy and it earns its keep across seasons.
- How do you tell surge damage from an ordinary dead part?
- By what the board does under load rather than by what it looks like. Visible scorching is rare and unhelpful; the common finding is an intermittent that clears on a power cycle and comes back. We test the supply first, because a sagging circuit produces the same symptom and costs nothing to rule out.
Owner feedback
What owners said after a call like this
4.5
out of 5, across 60 customer reviews. Each one is a single visit, in the words of the person whose kitchen it was.
The freezer drawer would not seal after we had a go at the runners ourselves. He set the drawer square again, renewed the perished gasket and checked the closing force. Our own bodge undone without a word of complaint.
Cordelia B.
It works now, but it took three visits to get there and nobody warned us the part would sit on order that long. The fault was a thermistor reading high. I would use them again with lower expectations about timing.
Hugo V.