Update on resolving this issue; some of you may be interested.
My insurance company is treating this as a comprehensive claim. My only cost should be the $500 deductible.List item
Their position is that they need to see damage of sufficient value to total the car. To this end, they want to continue to repair and re-repair the car unless and until this value is reached.
The insurance company offers a free lifetime guarantee on all service performed. I am verifying that this includes future towing, as I would want any warranty work to be performed by the present shop. They do good work, but are about 25 miles away.
As you can see from the generous (thanks, everyone!) responses I’ve received. There is plenty of good advice, as well as conflicting opinions. I plan to play the insurance company’s scenario, accept the car, and see if it’s really fixed. Winter weather coming on will speed up this process a bit. Fortunately, I don’t desperately need the car, so if it gets laid up, I can handle it. If it breaks big time, they’ve already got over $5K in it and we may hit the total limit. Otherwise, if it starts nagging at me too mch, I’ll dump it and try some of the tricks suggested above.
What really burns me up about this repair is that the insurance company claims the have no idea of what the odds of a successful repair are. This could be stonewalling, and adjuster swamped with flood claims who doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t know anything about this kind of repair, or similar nonsense.
Thanks again for your advice and support. It was a pleasant surprise.
Shouldn’t your repair shop be able to assure a successful repair? They are the people that perform the repairs, the insurance company just pays the bills.
The vehicle was struck by lightning in July, how long has the shop been trying to diagnose the electrical damage to the vehicle?
What happens if 5 out of 6 modules are repaired, the $5000 limit is reached, and it needs just $600 more work?
One issue is with insurance they may work with a shop that refuses to pull parts from a junk yard. Is that the case?
You can usually cash out and have the repair done yourself. But in this case they don’t know how much damage there is until repairs are attempted, so it’s weird.
No one does. Electronic parts can suffer catastrophic failures and those are easy to spot since those parts stop functioning. Latent failures also can occur where there is a partial failure of a part and it only fails later, maybe much later. Lightning is the prime cause but if the catastrophic failure occurs a couple years later but how can anyone say for sure the lightning strike was the cause?
I expect the insurance company knows what they are doing. They deal with this sort of problem all the time. In their experience, good chance there is only one or two problematic parts that need replacing/repairing, so best strategy $$-wise is for shop to work on it until fix is completed, or it is no longer affordable to continue.
Wow, that’s phenomenal. I haven’t heard of any company backing up their work for lifetime. Usually 60-90 days. If so, that is pretty reassuring. It’s not costing you anything but time so I’d let them keep going as long as the repair and insurance company are willing to keep funding this repair effort.
I had a garage door opener damaged by lightning. Funny part about lightning, only one of three ever suffered any issues. When I took it apart, reverse engineered the circuit board and found the problem, it was a 5 cent diode that had failed.
My extensive experience with lightning and power surge damaged electricals is that as you replace the damaged things that you can identify, more stuff fails. And once the items are operational, you need to operate the equipment for a long time before declaring it to be fixed.
I also took a lightning strike at my house a few years back. I immediately heard a large POP like a gunshot. The electric fence at my farm was toast. The box was literally blown up. I bought a new one the next day and went on with life. 2 days later I had no water. My well pump had quit. I called out a well company and they got it going but said the amp draw was WAY higher than specified for my pump. They said it could last another day, another year, or whatever. They also said it is just as common to see a pump quit days after a lightning strike as when it happens. They could get a new pump installed that day so I told them to just replace it and be done with it. A few months later my water heater died. It was the electronic board that controls the entire thing. Since it was about 12 years old, I just replaced the entire unit.
A couple years later one of my AC units had a major blow up in the compressor. The circuit breaker also fried during this incident. I have no way of knowing if that strike played a role but it might have shortened the life. It was a really hot day when this happened of course and it had been running nonstop all day. Luckily I had a couple old window units laying around that helped get me through this time until I could get a new unit during all these shortages.
None of my sensitive tech equipment suffered at all as it was all behind high joule surge protectors and on battery backups. A few of these devices were fried but they protected everything connected. I also installed a whole house surge protector after this happened. Another lightning strike took out the electric fence a few years later but no other issues have cropped up. I did learn not to have the electric fence on the same circuit as a refrigerator though. Luckily it wasn’t off very long.
I hit a deer in my 2015 Mitsubishi Mirage when it was brand new. I paid $10,200 for the car off the lot. It didn’t even have 3000 miles on it and the first oil change and filter was still sitting in cans in the backseat when I smoked the deer.
Insurance said it was repairable and under their 70 or 75% threshold for totaling it out. They authorized and spent like $6000 and then the body shop found more things wrong as they got into it. Of course they went over the limit but since the money was already spent, they finished the repair. Everything was repaired just fine in the end and I was happy to keep the car.
Now cheap cars like this are selling for more than I paid for it new with 90,000 miles on them. I am sure these used car prices have caused insurance to re-evaluate what is a total loss or not these days…
See my response about hitting a deer below. More damage was found during the repair but since money was already spent, they still opted not to total the car. This only makes sense for the insurance company to do this once they are dealing with sunk costs.
You have read the comments here. Anything or everything could have some damage. Damage that is not apparent until later. The mechanics can’t tell IF it can be fixed. Why would an adjuster be any more knowledgable? He is guessing, too.
I was pretty sure of that from the start. Needless to say this company doesn’t have much of a future with me. What’s a guy to do; reason didn’t work and attorney is too expensive. Car’s still in the shop waiting for parts, I’ll be moving on as soon as I get it back and figure it’s salable.
MY 2 cents… I am surprised the insurance has not totaled this vehicle. but I am going to guess and say after the mechanics install the new parts and find out the vehicle still needs more work. the insurance compant will total it. If by some chance they get the vehicle running correctly, I would sell it and move on. I see a lot more problems with it in the future and I do not think the insurance will say they are related. even though they will probably be.
HVAC technician here. I very seriously doubt that the lightning strike was (directly) responsible for your A/C compressor burning out. Especially since the compressor ran for more than a year after the incident. It is much more probable that the connections at the circuit breaker–especially between the circuit breaker itself and the bus bars–were loose and overheating, and the resulting voltage drop under heavy load caused the compressor windings to burn out.
Every year, during the hottest part of the summer, I have to replace plenty of swollen-up capacitors and several failed compressors together with damaged circuit breakers (and relocate the new breaker in the panel, or clean up the bus bars with sandcloth and apply NOALOX grease). The damaged circuit breaker is the cause, not the symptom.
Now I am sure that someone here who is a professional electrician is going to tell me that sanding damaged bus bars in a circuit breaker panel is a bad idea, and that the entire panel should be replaced. And they would be correct, however in the real world, people want to get their A/C running again at an affordable cost, not spend $3k or more to have an electrician change the panel. Plus the wait time for our electric utility to schedule a panel replacement is over 3 months out, and even on an “emergency” basis is over 3 weeks out. People don’t want to be without A/C for that long, if it can be avoided.
Interesting… I didn’t see any burn/arcing marks on the bus bar when I swapped the breaker. I might open up my panel to look so I don’t smoke the new mini-split I replaced the failed unit with.
I will say that the unit had gone through about 3 capacitors in the 2 years it ran after this incident. I just bought the Supco brand which I know is cheap so maybe that was part of the problem but I matched the ratings. My unit ran the two in one with a common, one side for the hermetic compressor, and another for the fan. It blew a hole in the compressor and sounded like a gunshot when whatever let go. I don’t know if the breaker directly triggered this or it was taken out during the incident but it flipped off as it probably should have. It was a Square D Homeline if that matters.
I do think I put the new mini-split on a different slot in the panel now that I think about it. I couldn’t source a replacement circuit breaker so tagged onto the one for my electric dryer while waiting to get another. Of course this isn’t a good idea as you would know but didn’t want to be without AC in the middle of July either. I just couldn’t run the AC and my dryer at the same time.
I do think I will open the thing up and pop the breakers out one by one to see if there is any damage on the bus bar. Of course sanding it down will require turning off the main or it would be the last (bad) decision I ever make.
Something else that might have led to this is that some of the lugs on my breakers were not real tight. I did go through with a screw driver and snug them all down so am sure that helped. I could literally pull gently and the wires would come right out of the lugs. This might have been my problem based on what you say and now that is fixed. A couple of the white wires (hots in the 240V) were actually discoloring and turning brown near the lugs for several of my circuits.
Not a pro electrician, but I wouldn’t have guessed that would cause any problems. I’ve never had to do that myself, but i could see how I might take a little emery cloth to the bus bar if it had some carbon or oxidation on it. Seems safe enough, I mean provided you took steps to not electrocute yourself in the process. Do building codes say removing oxidation from bus bars is not allowed? If so, maybe they are surface treated with something, and if that surface treatment is removed, could cause a higher resistance than allowed.
I believe the insurance company would consider this vehicle a total loss if the shop could produce an appropriate estimate for repair. This one piece at a time to get the vehicle operational is amateur play. Each circuit has a diagnostic procedure but requires time. Most of my co-workers don’t use these diagnostic procedures, expected to produce an estimate in 45 minutes so they guess.
My neighbor needed to have the circuit box replaced due to a melted bus bar at the circuit breaker for the HVAC system. I was surprised to see aluminum bus bars in the panel, this isn’t a location where I want to save money. He was without A/C for two weeks during 100 F weather.