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.

But you’re not prepping. Well I suppose technically you are mentally prepping but you’re saving the physical prepping until after the emergency.

But.....you haven't prepped anything....your list is full of "go out and get"....so sorry if I don't consider you a pepper. Major lol. Also, to answer you're question I wouldn't do anything but rely on my solar panels.

Ive never been a prepper type person but after being without power for 5 days after storm goretti and having a tree down over my driveway in a rural area. ive made some basic preparations .bottled water, bbq gas, tins, dry foods ,batteries,torches ,battery operated lights, power banks,logs, candles,matches,first aid supplies and medications,disinfectant, wet wipes.
So running around like a headless chicken isnt necessary,

You’re going to be going here there and everywhere!

OP might have picked the wrong topic but it's an interesting thread.

Errr we had a three hour power cut a few months ago and I just got some candles out.
we have prepped a lot of the things you have said you would get anyway. So in the event of a more serious event we would wait to see what happens I guess.
i think your plan is flawed, are the shop keepers going to remain open in such an emergency? If you haven’t prepped anything in the apocalypse, I think your best bet is to use a pair of old tights as a balaclava and start looting your local Big Sainsbury’s!

We are fully off grid, so would not be affected at in terms of home electricity, but obviously the supply chain issues, fuel situation etc would still impact us like everyone else. We actually had a village-wide power cut due to Storm Eoin last year, and the thing that worried me most was when the water went off for a while. So they water-storing thing would also be top of my list. (Although as we are in Ireland, we can get quite a bit from the sky!).

Step one of filling items with water when power is cut can be a useful step, the rest is nonsense.

I grew up where power cuts aren't that odd. It's really not this end of the world, everyone going looting, abandoning cars, wild west. It takes a bit more than that for most people. Some people are a little too keen to get into where they'd want to loot if they thought they could...

Also, cash registers to take cash still run on electricity. Businesses with generators are rarely going to have the staff or any desire to waste their generators selling to people grabbing things last minute when it's better used for security. Some might, but do not expect them to do so and don't expect them to sell it at a fair price in an emergency. Anything on your list that involves buying should either already done or planned to be done as soon as capable if you are a 'serious prepper' as others have mentioned. If you were really serious, concerned, and have the money to go all this in a very short amount of time when people will be price gouging - get solar panels that can be islanded off to work in a power outage. You'll still want candles and the like to be able to ration battery power if it's really bad, but as someone who lives with people who have medical equipment relying on electric, it's good peace of mind if you're in a position to do so.

Lastly, this whole 'fuck everyone else' mindset will in a long term situation make things worse for you. My first steps if I was home would be to gather the family - having a means of contact and people knowing routes home is a great step, then it would be check in with some of my neighbours. Making allies is the most essential 'prepper' step. If you've never gone through it to the point you think you're going to go out and just buy all of this from businesses 'taking cash', having people who've been there, done that, might save your skin.

Would be interesting to hear for someone who works at school. They should have policy regarding this. We had very similar experience, total panic.

If everyone else in your family is having to abandon their vehicles then how and why are you stealing a caravan 🤣

Well it is. The stuff you need in your list you should get now so it's to hand. It's a decent list, just get it in so you're not running around. Cars and whatnot won't stop working because the powers out. School power would probably go out so kids would be sent home. Just have a clear grandson plan in advance so parents don't have to think about it.

This board always gets weird comments. You just tune them out.

Step one of filling items with water when power is cut can be a useful step.

I like the idea. I was just thinking of filling the bath up. I like the idea of tubs with lids.

@BorgQueen may I ask how old you are?

The kids & I usually just get board games & candles out.. :-)

Frequent power cuts are a thing where I live. What i do is find the torch, get the power pack for my phone, fill a bottle of water and if it’s after dark, lock up downstairs and go to bed to keep warm, taking the cat with me. I put the landing light on so that I’ll know when the electricity is back on. Fortunately no power cuts recently has lasted more than 8 hours.

Um... we frequently suffer from three-day power-cuts every winter. Normally, our neighbourhood WhatsApp gets very active (and funny!), we impress each other with our extensive camping gear collections, get the Aran jumpers and Febreze out (our boilers require electricity to work), eat impressively ingenious meals out of whatever is in the tin cupboard, and everyone goes to bed when it's dark, because there isn't much else to do!

So, in short, we keep ourselves amused out in the countryside, farm and sleep. No looters here, as we might come after you with rather large farm machinery or the occasional shotgun, screaming, "Get off our land!" 😂

This is an interesting one though because you'd need a paddling pool or similar to collect it in which obviously you'd want to be pretty clean, and you'd need water purification tablets I guess. I don't own either of those things!

I’d light a few candles, read a book and use the camping stove to cook food. Actually, we already did this earlier in the year when we had a long power cut.
We also had two days without water due to a burst water main. It wasn’t pleasant but we survived.

PMSL at this thread.

If OP was a "serious" pepper then she'd already have all the stuff she was intending to steal. That's the point of prepping: being prepared, so you don't need to panic-buy, loot or steal.

Personally I'd grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint and wait for all of this to blow over!

Why don't you buy all the equipment now rather tham wait for the day of the actual power cut. I wouldn't want to be out amongst all the looters in the middle of an emergency.

I'm slowly prepping and buying extra bits as part of my weekly shop so I'm not putting strain on the supply chain during an actual urgency.

God, this has really tickled me. You're gagging to steal that unsecured caravan aren't you OP?!

We had a town-wide power cut earlier this year. We didn't know it was only town-wide because there was no internet or cell service.

We took the dogs on a longer walk than usual, stopped at the only open shop on the way home, and convinced the nice man behind the counter to loan us a bottle of vodka until the power came back on (it was our local shop; he knows us)

We then sat in the garden, had a fire, listened to Spotify downloaded playlists on phones powered by power packs, and had a nice evening without online distractions. At some point, the power came back on, but we were too pissed to care by that point.

I wasn't aware I should have been enacting my zombie survival plan instead of getting drunk on borrowed vodka. For future reference, what other non-life-threatening situations should trigger the zombie plan?

She needs to nick some bolt-cutters first to get through the chain link fence.

I would assume a serious prepper would know that you couldn’t do half the stuff on your list in the first hours of a nationwide power cut because there would be no power.