What to Do in a Power Cut

Before you report anything, look out of the window. If the street lights and your neighbours' houses are dark, it is a network fault and someone is already working on it. If everyone else has power, the fault is almost certainly inside your home.

Two things account for most single-house outages. The first is a tripped switch in your consumer unit (the fuse box, usually in a hallway, cupboard or garage). A single appliance developing a fault will trip it, so switch everything off at the socket, reset the trip, then turn appliances back on one at a time until it goes again. The one that trips it is the one to stop using.

The second is a prepayment meter that has run out of credit, which is easy to miss in the dark. Most meters give some emergency credit, and topping up will restore the supply.

The company that sends your bill is not the company that fixes the cables. Your supplier sells you the electricity; a regional distribution network operator owns the wires and responds to faults. In a power cut you want the network operator.

In England, Scotland and Wales, calling 105 is free from most landlines and mobiles and puts you through to the right operator automatically. You do not need to know who they are. Northern Ireland has a separate network: the number to report a power cut there is 03457 643643. Both are worth writing on your contact sheet now rather than looking up during an outage.

Most operators also publish a live fault map showing the affected area and an estimated restoration time, which is usually a better use of a nearly-flat phone battery than repeated calls.

A closed fridge stays cold for a surprisingly long time, and a closed freezer for far longer. Every time you open the door to check, you undo some of that. The single most useful thing you can do is decide early that the fridge stays shut until the power is back.

Commonly quoted guidance is that food in a fridge stays safe for around four hours if the door remains closed, and that a full freezer holds its temperature considerably longer than a half-empty one. Packing gaps with bottles of water helps. If you are unsure about a specific item afterwards, the Food Standards Agency has detailed advice on chilling and defrosting.

Use torches, not candles. Candles cause far more house fires than most people expect, and a cheap LED torch is brighter, safer and lasts for hours. A torch that stands on its end, or a lantern, lights a room better than one you have to hold.

Never bring outdoor cooking or heating equipment indoors. Barbecues, camping stoves, patio heaters and petrol generators all produce carbon monoxide, which you cannot see or smell. This is the one genuinely dangerous mistake people make during outages, and it is worth saying plainly: if it is designed for outdoors, it stays outdoors, including in a garage or a porch.

For warmth, close the curtains, shut doors to rooms you are not using, and put on more layers rather than trying to heat the house. Most gas boilers need mains electricity for their controls and pump, so central heating usually stops with the power.

Your phone is the thing you will miss most, so treat its battery as a resource from the first minute. Switch to low power mode, dim the screen, and use a power bank rather than draining the phone to light a room. That is what a torch is for.

Mobile networks have some battery backup at their masts, but it is not indefinite, and broadband routers stop the moment the power does. A battery or wind-up radio is the reliable fallback: local stations carry updates, and it uses a fraction of the power a phone does.

Longer outages are mostly a question of warmth, food and patience. Pick one room, keep it closed, and gather everyone in it. Eat what needs eating. A vacuum flask of boiling water filled before or early in an outage will still give you hot drinks hours later.

Check on neighbours who live alone or who rely on electrically powered medical equipment. If someone in your household falls into that group, sign up to the Priority Services Register, a free scheme run by energy and water suppliers that flags households needing extra support during an interruption. You register with each supplier directly, and thepsr.co.uk explains who is eligible. In Northern Ireland the equivalent schemes are called Customer Care Registers.

If anyone relies on medical equipment that needs mains power, official guidance is to keep a paper copy of the instructions and to keep any back-up batteries charged. That is worth doing now rather than in the dark.

Network operators also work to regulated standards on restoration times, and payments are sometimes available when a cut runs beyond a certain length. The thresholds and amounts change, so check your network operator's website rather than relying on a figure you read somewhere.

Almost everything above depends on four things being in the house and findable in the dark: a torch for each person, spare batteries, a charged power bank, and a radio that does not need mains power. Add a vacuum flask and a manual tin opener and you have covered the large majority of what a power cut actually asks of a household.