This part of the First Coast sees roughly sixty-eight thunderstorm days a year. Most of them do nothing to a kitchen. A few of them take a function off an appliance, and the owner does not connect the two events because the appliance still works.
Partial failure is the signature
An owner expecting surge damage expects a dead appliance. That is not usually what happens.
A modern built-in control board carries several functionally separate circuits on one piece of laminate: relay drivers for heating elements, a low-voltage sensor section, a display and touch interface, motor drives for fans and dampers, and the communication link between boards. A transient does not distribute itself evenly across those. It finds a path, and what is on that path fails.
So the reports we get are specific rather than general. An oven that heats accurately but has lost its convection fan. A cooktop where one zone will not come on and the rest are perfect. A hood that runs at full speed but has lost the intermediate settings and the lights. A dishwasher that completes a cycle with the upper spray never having run.
Each of those sounds like a mechanical fault. Each is worth a question about whether it started after weather.
Why timing is genuinely diagnostic
We ask because it changes the order in which we test.
If a convection fan is not turning, the ordinary sequence is: check the fan motor, check its wiring, then check the board that drives it. Motors fail more often than boards, so that order is right most of the time. If the fault appeared the morning after a storm, the probability shifts, and we start at the drive circuit instead. That is often the difference between one visit and two.
Multiple unrelated faults appearing in the same week in the same house are the strongest signal of all. Appliances do not coordinate; a supply event does.
Where the damage actually enters
Not always through the mains. A surge on the incoming service is the obvious route, but built-ins in this area are frequently networked to each other and, in newer installations, to the home’s low-voltage systems. A transient induced on a long low-voltage run inside a wall can reach a communication port with no damage anywhere on the power side at all. Those faults are the confusing ones: an appliance that works perfectly on its own controls and has stopped talking to anything.
Salt-corroded connector pins make everything above worse. A pin that has bloomed green in coastal humidity is a resistance in a circuit that was designed without one, and resistance under a transient becomes heat. We check harnesses before we quote boards on this coast for exactly that reason.
What protection is worth fitting
A power strip is not an option for a built-in, because a built-in is hard-wired. The only protection that reaches it is at the panel: a whole-house surge protective device on the service entrance, ideally with a second stage protecting the kitchen circuits.
That is electrician work, not appliance work, and we do not sell it. We mention it because a built-in suite represents a substantial amount of control electronics sitting behind a single point of entry, and the arithmetic is not close.
Where a house has an unprotected panel and a history of storm-related appliance faults, fixing the panel is the repair. Everything else is a consequence.
If it has already happened
Note what stopped working and what did not — the list of surviving functions is as informative as the list of failed ones. Note the date. Do not run repeated self-clean or diagnostic cycles hoping the fault clears; on a partially damaged board, running the appliance hard is the surest way to take the rest of it out.
Flat $129 diagnostic, credited toward the repair. Written estimate before anything is ordered.