Phase Drop at Pole and Now Appliances Out

[rustlerski]

A few weeks back I started getting intermittent outages without breakers tripping. It would self resolve after some time. During one outage I was eventually able to troubleshoot and found that exactly half my panel was out. I called the utility company and they came out next day and found a bad connection at their pole on one of the drops to my house.

As soon as they fixed that, I noticed oddities at my oven, beverage fridge and main fridge. In the past week the beverage fridge and main fridge controls completely died. Could this be related to the bad phase on the drop? If so, what would be the right way to describe this to my insurer?

Thank you!

edit: Forgot to mention that those appliances were on the half of the panel impacted by the outages if relevant.

 

[Jadnashua]

Depending on how things are wired and exactly what fails, it's possible that 240vac got to places where 120vac was supposed to be. Also, having intermittent connections is hell on electronics...it could be the equivalent of turning the thing on/off numerous times per minute. Electronics don't like to be turned on/off repeatedly or to have spikes or surges applied.

I would just tell the insurance people that the power company found an intermittent connection on your power line and it caused those items to fail as a result. Somebody may have a better description.

 

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[rustlerski]

Thank you. Appreciate just sending them something simple and concise like that.

I also now recall that the guys who came out to fix it found "low voltage" on the drop that had the bad connection. I believe it was around 110 where it came into the house as the connection happened to come back on shortly before they came out.

In doing a little research tonight, could it also be a continuos low voltage on the two fridges (which run constantly unlike other appliances) that would cause their electronic components to burn out?

Attached is what I found in the main fridge earlier today - board was burned through, two resistors burned off and the main connection clip melted.
Unfortunately they don't make the board anymore otherwise I'd handle this out of pocket and not through insurance.

Any other thoughts are much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Jadnashua]

Looks more like overvoltage to me, but then, I"m not an expert in that area. 110vac is not out of range for devices in the USA...there's an acceptable range, and that's within it.

While low voltage (maybe around 100 or less) will cause the circuit to try to draw more current, that looks like over voltage issues to me. Overcurrent would likely have melted the tar in the transformer (the rectangle with the bronzy ring around it).

Power = volts x amps. Devices tend to want to use the same amount of power, but if volts goes down, amps must go up, and there's a limit on how many amps a circuit can take before it overheats. Conversely, if the volts goes way high, the amps would go down to maintain the same power rating, but the devices themselves (such as the spacing where it might arc, the width of the trace on the circuit board being too light a gauge to handle the load, etc.) are limited to within the 'normal' range plus a little tolerance.