Hurricane Season Prep for Your Appliances: The South Florida Checklist

Every June, South Florida preps shutters, water, and gas tanks — and every September, appliance repair phones ring for a week straight with the same calls: refrigerators that never restarted, control boards fried by the power flickering back on, washers that flooded when nobody was home. Most of that damage is preventable with an hour of prep.

Here’s the checklist we’d give our own neighbors in Hallandale Beach, Hollywood, and Aventura.

Before the storm (when a watch is issued)

1. Turn your fridge and freezer to their coldest settings.

You’re banking cold. A packed freezer at maximum cold holds safe temperatures roughly 48 hours unopened; half-full, about 24. Freeze water bottles now to fill empty space — thermal mass is your friend, and you’ll have drinking water later.

2. Make ice, then disconnect the ice maker’s job.

Bag whatever ice your machine produces between now and landfall. After that, the ice maker becomes a liability if water service gets interrupted or contaminated — you don’t want it making ice from a boil-water-notice supply.

3. Run and empty the dishwasher and washer.

A washer full of wet clothes plus three days without power equals a mildew project. Finish the loads, leave doors ajar to dry, and — this is the one people miss — shut off the washer’s water valves. A pressure surge when service resumes, or a hose failure while you’re evacuated, floods your unit and possibly the three below it. In a condo, this single step is the whole ballgame.

4. Decide your surge strategy now.

The grid coming *back* kills more electronics than the storm itself — brownouts, spikes, and rapid cycling are brutal on the control boards in modern refrigerators, ranges, and laundry. If you’re evacuating or the storm looks serious, the bulletproof move is simple: unplug what you can. The refrigerator is the judgment call — keep it running for food, but consider plugging it into a quality surge protector rated for appliances (the cheap power strip is not that).

5. Photograph your kitchen and laundry.

Sixty seconds of phone photos, including model/serial stickers, makes any future insurance conversation enormously easier.

6. In flood-zone or ground-floor units: think vertically.

If you have any history of water intrusion, raise what can be raised. Even setting a garage freezer up on blocks has saved more than one Thanksgiving turkey.

During the outage

• Keep the fridge closed. Every opening costs you cold you can’t replace. Tape a “DON’T OPEN” note on it if there are kids (or snack-driven adults) in the house.
• Don’t run appliances on a small generator’s dirty power unless the generator is inverter-type or properly rated. Cheap generator power can do exactly the board damage you were trying to avoid.
• Gas range users: burners may light with a match during an outage, but never use the oven for heat or run burners for long stretches with windows sealed.

After the power returns

1. Stagger the restart. When power comes back, don’t let every appliance slam on at once — that first hour of grid power is often the dirtiest. Plug things back in over the course of an hour, fridge first.

2. Apply the food rules without sentiment. Above 40°F for more than two hours, perishables go. When in doubt, throw it out — a fridge restock is cheaper than the alternative.

3. Check the fridge actually recovered. A refrigerator that struggles, clicks, or runs warm after an outage took electrical damage — start relays and boards are the usual victims, and they’re repairable. Catching it day one beats discovering it with the next week’s groceries.

4. Open the water valves slowly and watch. Turn the washer valves back on and check the hose connections for drips over the next day. If your building issued a boil-water notice, leave the ice maker off and flush it after the notice lifts: dump the first two batches of ice and replace the filter.

5. Listen for new noises. A washer or range that behaves differently after a storm — new hums, error codes, a burner that won’t fire — took a hit. Modern appliances rarely fail dramatically from surges; they fail weirdly. Our washer repair and range repair calls spike for two weeks after every major outage, and the early calls are always the cheaper ones.

The condo addendum

High-rise life adds two items:

• Know your building’s post-storm water and elevator status before scheduling any repair — we coordinate with front desks constantly after storms, and buildings with damaged service elevators change the logistics.
• If you evacuate for the season anyway, consider the full shutdown: fridge emptied and propped open, water valves off, breakers off for the laundry. Appliances survive storms better powered down than half-protected.

The freezer-coin trick (do this today)

One prep item costs nothing and answers the question every evacuee asks from three states away: “did the power stay on?” Freeze a cup of water, set a coin on top of the ice, and leave it in the freezer. When you return, a coin still on top means the freezer held; a coin at the bottom of refrozen water means everything thawed and refroze while you were gone — toss the food, no guesswork, no sniff tests. A coin halfway down means a partial thaw; judge the contents accordingly. It’s the cheapest food-safety instrument ever invented, and it works equally well for a weekend evacuation or a whole season away.

Keep one number handy

After every named storm, the repair queue in southeast Broward gets long fast — and the earliest callers get the same-day slots. Norma Appliance Repair is based in Hallandale Beach, open 7 days, and we triage post-storm calls all season: (954) 775-8660. Better yet, run this checklist in June and let the storm find your appliances ready.