I have a lot of power surges in my area. Recently, the old power shut off, then power back on in 3 seconds thing happened - and the surge was enough to pop my fridge motors and cause a $900 repair.

I upgraded them to not only a surge protector, but this little neat shut off device. It's a device that goes between the fridge and the wall outlet, and basically if for any reason this device loses power - it shuts off the power to the powered device for a minimum of 3 minutes. This way the power can blink 100 times in 3 minutes, and my fridge won't have to eat 100 surges. It will just happily sit off for 3 minutes, and then come back on.

Can you share what device you're using for the 3-minute shut-off and recovery?

I have this guy

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D7KP8S4

But am not partial to this brand or anything. But it seems to do what it says it will do.

What kind of fridge do you have that draws several hundred watts continuously? I haven’t tested my fridge, but I have a very large chest freezer that never draws more than ~35W. Surely a fridge can’t be 10x worse than that.

I seriously doubt that your freezer max draw is 35W. An Energy Star freezer can only average ~25W across the entire year. I doubt that the peak is less than 1.4x the average draw.

A fridge max power draw is usually during the defrost cycle. My defrost heater measures a bit over 500W.

You’re probably right, but I did watch my freezer plugged into a kill-a-watt for a while, and even when the compressor first kicked on, I never saw anything higher than 35W. Maybe the kill-a-watt is inaccurate, or maybe it doesn’t update fast enough, I’m not sure. Another factor, too: it doesn’t have any sort of auto defrost.

Different models and different designs and everything, but just as another data point, I recall my chest freezer pulling 300W+ when the compressor kicks on, and likely higher transient spikes, as it kept burning out the fuse on my 500W transformer, and I had to switch to a 1kW one.