Every summer storm season, the same pattern: lightning rolls through overnight, the power blinks twice and comes back — and the next afternoon our phone fills with air conditioners that never restarted and wells that quit pumping. The storm didn't hit anything. The blink did the damage.
Why blinks hurt worse than outages. A clean outage is just off. The blink — power dropping and surging back in a second or two — is what stresses equipment: voltage spikes ride in on the restore, and motors that were running get asked to restart against pressure they weren't built to fight. Compressors and well pumps hate it most.
The AC that won't come back. After a blink, give the system five minutes before touching anything — modern units have restart delays on purpose, protecting the compressor while pressures equalize. Still nothing? Check the breaker (flip it fully OFF, then ON — half-tripped breakers look normal), and check the float switch hasn't shut things down. If it hums but won't start, stop there: that's the classic sound of a capacitor that gave its life in the surge, and running it that way cooks the motor it protects. Capacitors are a cheap, same-day fix — the motor isn't.
The well that stopped pumping. Country homes get a double hit: no power means no water, and the restart can trip the well breaker or stick the pressure switch. Breaker first, then the pressure gauge on the tank — our well guide walks the whole no-water morning in order. If storms regularly take your pump's breaker with them, tell us; that's a symptom, not a coincidence.
The cheap insurance almost nobody has. Surge protection — a whole-home unit at the panel, plus a hard-start or surge device at the condenser — costs a small fraction of one control board, and modern equipment is all control boards. If your house is on the rural lines where blinks are a weekly event, it's some of the best money you can spend on equipment life.
One safety line, because every storm season needs it: if you run a portable generator, it feeds appliances through cords or a proper transfer switch — never through a wall outlet. Backfeeding kills linemen. After the storm passes, if something didn't come back on: (901) 699-7763, any hour.
