What would you do in the first hours of a nationwide power cut? A handy tips thread.

[BorgQueen]

1. Before ANYTHING else : Fill 3 x 120l lidded storage boxes with water. Plus every bottle, pan and vase.
2. Go and collect my Grandson from school if he was there. I could walk it in 30 mins if need be, DD would likely have to abandon her car and walk home, taking 3 hours+ . Her partner works 30 miles away in Manchester so god knows what he’d do, steal a bike if he had any sense and cycle home using the many canal paths.
3. Walk into my village and buy cat litter, bin bags, a garden incinerator, steel buckets, batteries, lighters and whatever else looked useful plus calorie dense food and whatever medical supplies I could find while they would still take cash.
4. Go to the garden centre down the road and buy a gas bbq/ gas and lots of solar lights, along with one of those camping trollies with cash before everyone realised what was coming.
5. Go to the caravan/camping sales place by the garden centre and buy a camping shower, lots of gas bottles and look to see which caravan would be easiest to steal if it came to having to leave/hide, one that could be wheeled out by cutting the chain link fence and taken to a well hidden place. Thankfully DH has a tow bar on his van.
6. Make sure we could black out all the windows at night to stop light escaping.
7. Get DH to make large wooden barriers with decking joists to prevent the front and back doors being battered in. His power tool batteries are always fully charged.
8. Park his van across the big front window and my car so it blocked access to the garage.
9. Scope out a local vending supplies warehouse, unless you knew what and where it was, people wouldn’t even think about it, they’d be too busy robbing cash converters.

1.Take car.
2.Go to mum's.
3.Kill Phil, grab Liz.
4.Go to the Winchester.
5.Have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.

PS thanks OP. Your post has made me and my family hoot with laughter.

We didn't do any of this nonsense in the seventies.

Ah hah!!
So the diesel / petrol car owners have the last laugh!!

.....but in the seventies it was only off for hours not days/ weeks / months.........

Have as much stuff ready beforehand.

Have your community ready. You need your neighbours. I know which neighbour I need onside.

You can store BBQ and charcoal in the garage/shed.

You would need to know how to start fires, cook on fires, how to filter and sterilise water. Make a Dutch oven. Use a hay box. Which food you can eat from the environment. How to preserve food. How to catch animals.

How to keep warm in the cold. Cool in summer.

Multiple redundancies.
Cooking on BBQ , camping stove, solar oven, Kelly kettle , open fire.

Solar lights, head torches, lanterns, batteries, solar charger, power banks, candles, matches, oil lamps.

Little point in going to the shops, power needed for tills and many couldn't stay open without light and operating alarms for health and safety.

Short-term, I'd eat anything cold from fridge and items that don't need cooking from freezer. We've got a camping stove and gas, as well as back up supply of store cupboard groceries (including those that won't make things too hard to clean without hot water). Ideally I'd have some chilled wine in fridge 😀.

They should have some sort of design to disengage ik a power outage because a fire could cause a power outage too and people need to be able to evacuate and fire brigade need to be able to get in.

Having lived through blackouts I don’t understand why people would have to abandon cars
Or why you would be going to the diy store. It won’t be open
(no lights, no security cameras and if you are thinking about doing this then the staff at these stores will be doing the same.)

It’s a blackout. Why would you think your neighbours would be breaking into your garage

Do peppers realise that if things are as bad as OP envisages, cooking food will be a big mistake as marauders will smell it? Cold baked beans only!

I was small in the 70s power cuts and remember enjoying them - apart from when children’s television went off. Luckily we had fireplaces and so had heat and toast!

Yes, this was us last year in Spain. Luckily we were in our camper, which has gas, a leisure battery and solar panels...but, there was no way to buy anything, card readers were down, ATMs down, petrol stations closed. Luckily we had food in the van. BUT...
we were trapped in a car park for 5 hours after the electric barrier stopped working. Not nec something you think about. We were released by a man after nearly 6 hours after trying, with halting Spanish, to communicate into the "press and speak" button on the barrier.

See above, no arms or card readers...get cash!

Atms

Depends on what you are cooking. If you are just heating water to add to rice/noodles/packet soup etc you can decant the water into a thermos, bring it indoors and then mix it there. You've got to be a bit creative. 😂Other things, well do a practice run with them and see how much smell there is. You may need to heat food during rainy weather, in which case I doubt there'll be any smell.

Keeping my car topped up and park it in a garage when not using it. I remember in the 70s(?) people were siphoning of petrol from other cars.

BorgQueen there wouldn’t be anybody to serve the public, all workers would have gone home to be with their families.
Who would stay at their post if everyone thought of themselves? Think of anyone in the health service from the cleaners to the top surgeons, the firefighters, the peace keepers from prisons to police, and then the utility workers.

I’d thank god for the excuse to drink my four bottles of champers - I ve been waiting for an ‘occasion’ 🤣🤣🤣

Surely if it’s winter time and heating off then you’d eat the stuff in the fridge/freezer that’d last five days including frozen bread /rice/soup. Just need something to heat it up.

For me:
fill my large pots with water before the pressure fails (I am on floor 11 but there are 24 floors so I’ll have some for a while).

Go to the basement -2, collect my 1 ring camping stove to cook on my balcony (or outside in the main square). And my hardsided cooler (to act as regular fridge). And my bag of emergency cat litter.

Put my solar panel up to recharge my power bank if it’s not absolutely full.

clear the walkway between the front door, kitchen, dining table and on to my room/bed.

Pull out the candles and matches for later, putting candles into their proper holders.

Charge up my rechargeable lantern from the power bank if it’s not full.

Go to the shop nearest me and buy 2 bags of ice. Use them in the cooler, and put in the things I am always opening the fridge for - milk, jam, cheese - and a dinner for tonight , and take a dinner from the freezer for tomorrow to defrost (keeps cooler chilled but also means I don’t touch freezer again for 36 hours so it might stay frozen).

Set up alternative toilet facilities (probably 1 toilet ok for wee, I’d have 2 flushes available in the tanks for the first day or so, but then builders sacks and kitty litter in a bucket (or dry toilet bowl) would be the solution. Unless I managed a 3rd flush from my watering can. That aspect was much easier with a rain butt in the garden of my house and a bucket/watering can to transfer the water.

Then grab my cosy blankets and cushions, open wine, and my emergency chocolate stash, grab a book…as once I’m sorted, I may as well relax and enjoy. (No DCs here, and “only” an adult DC and DH at home when I’m there so much easier now).

BiddyPopthe2nd - shops won't be open for health and safety purposes, ie not sufficient lighting and alarms, on top of which tills won't operate without power, so no ice. At least you have some wine, so can relax about the situation for a while!

Most power cuts are local and over within hours, so my first hour is boring on purpose. Check whether it's just us (neighbours, or ring 105, the free power cut number). Torches out, not candles, especially with kids about. Fridge and freezer doors shut: a full freezer stays frozen for about two days if you leave it alone. Phones onto low power mode and save the power bank for the one we really need. Then fill a couple of jugs with water just in case and get the blankets out. If it's still off by evening, that's when I'd start thinking about food and warmth, not before.

Ditto.

Surely any serious preppers would already have all this stuff?!

Yes they would! I do, it's taken awhile to amass what I need and even then I still find gaps. I'm getting a bigger thermos flask today as the one I have is quite small, getting a 1.2L flask will store more hot water for longer, saves multiple trips to the camping stove! Also means I can have hot water ready on waking if the power is out overnight.

Hackers from another country have proved in France how weak the food chain is. They have attacked cold storage and wasted frozen food.

Even most serious peppers who already have “all this stuff” need to do a few things (like make sure walkways are clear to not fall over things in the dark later, pull things out of cupboards, fills some pots with fresh water)….not necessarily rushing to buy tonnes of things.

I know I said “buy ice”. - that’s if the small local shop is selling on a cash basis. If not, I’ll take a frozen meal from freezer to defrost in the coolbox to keep things relatively cold while I use that as my main fridge (to keep fridge as cold as possible for as long as possible) and to have something to easily heat the following day (whether the power is still off or not. - I eat a lot from batch cooked meals in the freezer).

And there’s also usually no need to massively rush to the stock of tins and stored emergency foods - the food in the fridge should still be good to eat cold or to cook on day 1, and hopefully into day 2 if you keep it relatively cold…and freezer foods start to need to be used day 2-3 (again, keep it closed as much as possible to keep the cold in…). But if you have no cooking options, then you may be breaking into the cheese on crackers day 1 and tuna/sweetcorn on crackers day 2, but may find that cold baked beans are acceptable on day 3 if it continues…