Unplugging everything when a storm rolls in sounds responsible. It's the advice people have been passing around for decades. But how you do it, and when, is the part nobody talks about, and getting it wrong has cost some of my customers real money.
The timing is everything. If you're yanking cords out of the wall while lightning is already hitting nearby, you're not protecting your appliances. You're pulling a disconnect during exactly the moment a voltage spike might be traveling through the line. That's the worst possible window. The arc risk alone should give you pause.
The right move is before the storm. Watch the forecast like a normal person, and if there's a thunderstorm warning for the evening, unplug your sensitive stuff in the afternoon. That's it. That's the whole strategy.
If you missed that window, leave it alone
Seriously. If the storm is already on top of you and you didn't unplug anything, just let it ride. If you have a surge protector on your TV or computer, let it do its job. If you don't have one, that's a problem to solve next week. Pulling plugs mid-storm is not the answer.
I had a call out of Naugatuck a couple years back that I still think about. Woman heard thunder, panicked, and yanked the washing machine cord during a rinse cycle. Machine didn't get hit by lightning. The surge never even reached it. But killing power mid-cycle scrambled the control board anyway. That was a $280 repair, completely avoidable.
Not every appliance deserves the same treatment
TVs, computers, microwaves with digital displays, those are the things worth unplugging early. The control boards inside them are sensitive and expensive to replace. A fried board in a mid-range microwave might cost more to fix than the microwave is worth.
Your refrigerator is a different story. Unplugging it mid-storm creates problems of its own, and not just the food. Compressors don't love being cut and restarted abruptly. I've had customers unplug their fridge "to be safe," plug it back in right after the storm passed, and then call me because they thought the fridge was dead. It wasn't dead. The compressor just needed a few minutes to equalize pressure before it would kick on. Scared them half to death for nothing.
If the fridge is running, leave it running.
What your surge protector probably can't handle
Most of the things people call surge protectors are just power strips. There's a difference. A real surge protector has a joule rating printed on the box. Most homeowners have never heard of a joule rating. If you can't find it, assume the strip isn't doing much for you beyond adding outlets.
Point-of-use strips rated 1000 joules or above are worth having for electronics. For your appliances, especially anything with a sophisticated control board, the better investment is whole-house surge protection installed at the panel. An electrician can put one in for somewhere around $300 to $500 depending on your setup. That covers everything at once and it handles spikes that would blow right through a cheap strip.
Speaking of control boards: modern appliances are genuinely more vulnerable to surges than the machines from twenty years ago. The old mechanical washers didn't have much to fry. Today's stuff is running software. A bad storm season a few years back brought us a stretch of LG French door fridges with fried main boards, one after another. Those repairs were landing between $350 and $500, which is the exact range where the conversation about repair versus replacement gets genuinely uncomfortable. You can browse our appliance repair services to get a sense of what we typically deal with, but trust me, you'd rather not be in that conversation.
When the storm clears, don't just flip everything back on
Stagger your restarts. Give the grid a minute to stabilize, then bring things back on in sequence. Fridge first, then washer and dryer, then everything else. And if the fridge doesn't seem to kick on right away, wait ten minutes before you assume anything is wrong. Compressors need a pressure equalization period. Most of the panicked post-storm calls we get resolve themselves before we even get in the truck.
One more thing worth saying: if your home has older wiring, surges travel through it more easily. Not going to turn this into an electrical safety lecture, but it's a reason to take the whole-house protector idea more seriously if you're in an older house.
Late spring through early fall is when this stuff matters most around here, so now is a reasonable time to actually think it through instead of reacting badly when the sky goes dark.
If something did take a hit and you're not sure what you're dealing with, contact our team and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth fixing. And if you already know you need a repair, go ahead and schedule a repair and we'll get out to you. We're usually booked a few days out but we move fast on anything that's keeping food from staying cold.
