Apparently we were close to experiencing power blackouts last night so tonight could be a repeat

[user8762456]

Time to charge up your laptops, battery packs etc and make sure you know where the candles and torches are..

I'm about to cook dinner now in readiness- just in case!

Our house is fully electric so if the power goes out we’ll be stuffed. We both keep our phones charged and I have a power pack. We have candles and torches. We also have a camping stove and gas.

Be careful with the camping stove , friend had a nasty bum during a power cut.

The OP did not come across as anxious. None of us are anxious. We didn't do anxious because we're preppers.

We get alerted to look at our prep. I've learned that I still don't have a battery for my inverter because life got in the way. I need a backup power supply because I have snakes who need to be kept warm. So I'm on that now, because of this thread.

I don't take electricity for granted, just like I don't take being able to shop for food for granted. Something that did me a good deed during the first lockdown.

This is the prepper topic. This is what we do here. You're calling me names but I'm not the one who's made a tit of themselves dude.

You're reading those newspapers again .... Every winter the reserves go lower at certain points. That's planned for ...ignore these rags

Some people live in areas where power cuts aren't that unusual. Us for instance.

Between weather conditions, overhead electricity poles. Various agencies turning off zones because our lanes are narrow so digging up for water leaks, gas leaks they sometimes slice through cables. Neighbours daughter skidded on wet leaves, hit the pole, kaput went the power late one night.

Only idiots don't keep in torches, candles, matches etc and know where they are.

Just a wooshing sound over your head then....

You're missing the point of this thread.

Reported.

Thank you @justasking111 we have experience using the camping stove but haven’t used it for a few years. DH is very risk averse so if needs be he will check everything before we use it.

You're welcome. We find a wire brush useful for clearing out muck once the bits have had a good soak in hot water. Icheck the rubber tubing hasn't perished. I'd pretest then you can pretend you're camping 😁

Interesting. We lost our power over the weekend, along with a large chunk of the area, due to a 'fault'. I'm normally fairly prepped (in a messy, can't find stuff sort of way) but we had hardly any logs (DH went out for some), the only power bank we could find was flat, neither of us had plugged our phones in overnight for lazy reasons, and the batteries in the camping lantern were almost dead too! Nothing we couldn't rectify but I felt silly. Also it didn't occur to me to get my box of Price's candles out for quite a bit!

On the back of this (it was only off for the day but on the coldest day for about a year and even with the woodturner and candles, it was cold and dark and miserable!) I'll have another think about cooking options, because we ended up going out for a hot meal elsewhere, and got unaffected friends to fill thermoses/hot water bottles, etc. Obviously couldn't have done that if the cut had been more widespread. I binned our gas cassette stoves after one leaked and caught fire while we were camping, so all I've got for camping is a rocket stove which you can't use indoors! And it was so cold, I couldn't face cooking outside if I knew I wasn't going to be able to warm up indoors properly.

The other things I learned/got a reminder about were to always plug in phones (we almost always do, it was a stupid perfect storm that neither of us had) and make sure the power banks are charged regularly, otherwise they're just stupid ugly bookmarks.

Murphy's law!