How to Prepare for a Power Cut in the UK (2026 Guide)

Almost everything that makes a power cut easy is decided before it happens. Set a timer for ten minutes and work through this list today.

1. Save 105 in your phone. Dial 105 from a mobile or landline anywhere in England, Scotland or Wales and you reach your local electricity network operator, the company that actually fixes cuts. It is charged at no cost. In Northern Ireland, the equivalent is NIE Networks on 03457 643 643.
2. Find your consumer unit now, in daylight. It is usually in the hallway, under the stairs, in the garage or by the front door. Look at the row of switches and note which is the main switch and which are the RCDs or trip switches. Hunting for a fuse box by phone light is how people fall down stairs.
3. Learn who your network operator is. Your electricity supplier bills you; your distribution network operator (DNO) owns the wires. Enter your postcode at powercut105.com, run by the Energy Networks Association, and write the name inside a kitchen cupboard door.
4. Put a working torch in every bedroom plus spare batteries in one known place.
5. Keep one power bank charged and stored in the same drawer every time.
6. Write a paper card of key numbers: 105, your DNO, your boiler engineer, a neighbour, and any carer or telecare line. Phones die; paper does not.
7. Buy a fridge and freezer thermometer such as a simple fridge freezer thermometer. It turns the after-a-cut food decision from guesswork into a reading.
8. Check whether anyone in the house qualifies for the Priority Services Register (full section below). Most eligible households have never signed up.
9. Know your landline reality. Digital landlines run through your router, so they stop in a power cut unless you have backup. Details below.
10. Agree a simple household rule set: nobody opens the fridge or freezer, torches not candles, and everyone gathers in one room.

That is the whole foundation. The rest of this guide builds on it.

You do not need a bunker. You need one drawer or box that every adult in the house can find in the dark, holding roughly this:

• Light: a torch per person and one room filling rechargeable lantern. A lantern such as the BioLite AlpenGlow rechargeable lantern lights a dinner table properly, where a torch only lights a spot.
• Power: a high capacity power bank, around 20,000mAh or more, kept topped up. The Anker 737 power bank class of device will recharge a family's phones several times over.
• Information: a battery powered DAB or FM radio. In a longer storm outage, local BBC radio carries restoration updates when mobile signal fades.
• Warmth and comfort: a blanket or two, hot water bottle, gloves and a woolly hat. The house loses heat slowly, people lose it faster.
• Food and water: snacks that need no cooking, and a few litres of bottled water, because some homes on pumped supplies lose water pressure too. Our emergency water guide covers how much to store.
• Morale: a pack of cards and glow sticks if you have young children. A power cut handled well becomes a story they enjoy telling.

For the complete inventory, including the items most households forget, see our full UK emergency kit list.

The Priority Services Register (PSR) is the single most underused piece of the UK's power cut system. It is a support scheme run by energy suppliers and network operators across Great Britain, provided at no cost, and it exists precisely for the moments this guide covers.

You can join if you:

• have reached State Pension age;
• have a disability or long term medical condition, or are recovering from an injury or hospital stay;
• rely on medical equipment that needs mains power, such as a stairlift, hoist, dialysis machine, oxygen concentrator or powered bed;
• are deaf or have hearing loss, are blind or partially sighted, or have a mental health condition;
• are pregnant or have children under five;
• have extra communication needs, for example if English is not your first language;
• would struggle to answer the door or get help in an emergency.

What you get: advance notice of planned power cuts, priority updates and support during unplanned ones, and in prolonged outages network operators can arrange practical help such as hot meals, charging facilities or alternative accommodation for medically dependent households. There is also a password scheme so you can verify that a caller at your door genuinely works for the network.

How to sign up, properly: the registers are held separately, so contact your electricity supplier and ask to join their PSR, ask them to pass your details to your network operator as well, and repeat with your gas supplier if different. If you switch supplier, re-register. Anyone with mains powered medical equipment should also tell their DNO directly via 105 or its website, so they are flagged for priority restoration and contact during cuts.

Three modern realities catch households out, so plan for them now.

Your landline probably needs electricity. The UK is moving all landlines to digital voice, which runs through your broadband router. No power, no router, no landline. Ofcom requires phone providers to give customers who depend on their landline, for example those with telecare alarms or no mobile signal at home, a solution that keeps emergency calls working for at least one hour of a power cut, provided at no cost to those at risk. If that describes your household, ring your provider and ask for it by name: a battery backup unit for the router or handset.

A small UPS keeps your internet alive for hours. A router and Openreach box together typically draw only around 10 to 25 watts, so a modest uninterruptible power supply such as the APC Back-UPS 650VA can keep broadband, digital landline and smart home hubs running for several hours. Owners commonly report a router lasting most of an evening on one. A portable power station with a UPS mode does the same job and then doubles as general backup; see our guide to the best portable power stations in the UK.

Your heating almost certainly stops too. Gas and oil boilers need mains electricity for their pumps, fans and controls, so most central heating goes off with the lights. That is why the warmth section below matters even in a gas heated home. When power returns, most boilers restart themselves, but note any error code before ringing an engineer.

Surge protection is cheap insurance. Restoration can bring brief voltage spikes. Keep televisions, computers and consoles on surge protected extension leads, and switch sensitive equipment off during a cut rather than leaving it to take the surprise.

Here is the exact sequence, in order, when the lights go out.

1. Check whether it is just you. Look at your consumer unit. If the main switch or an RCD has tripped, the problem is inside your home, not the network. Reset it once. If it holds, a momentary blip tripped it. If it trips again immediately, unplug everything on that circuit, especially kettles, heaters and anything that was running, then reset and plug items back in one at a time to find the culprit. If it still will not hold with everything unplugged, stop and call a qualified electrician. Do not keep forcing a tripping switch.
2. Check the street. Switches all up but no power? Look for neighbours' lights and streetlights. A dark street means a network fault.
3. Dial 105. You will get recorded local updates or a person, and you can report damage such as fallen lines. Never approach a downed power line; report it on 105, or 999 if it is an immediate danger. If you have signal and battery to spare, your DNO's live map at powercut105.com usually shows the fault and an estimated restoration time.
4. Switch off what was running. Turn off the hob, oven, iron and any portable heaters so nothing surprises you when power returns, and switch off sensitive electronics. Leave one light switched on so you know the moment supply is back.
5. Seal the cold. Note the time the power went off, on paper, then declare the fridge and freezer closed. The timings in the next section all start from that note.
6. Set up for comfort. Lantern on the table, layers on, everyone into one room, curtains closed if it is cold outside. Then put the kettle on the list of things you miss and play cards.

Food is the biggest real cost of most power cuts, and the rules are simpler than people think. The Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland publish specific guidance:

• Under 4 hours: relax. A cut shorter than about four hours is unlikely to affect the safety of food in a closed fridge or freezer.
• Fridge: about 4 hours of protection with the door kept shut. Once chilled food has risen above 8C, food that needs refrigeration should be eaten, or cooked and eaten, within four hours of passing that point. This is where your fridge thermometer earns its keep: a reading beats a guess.
• Freezer: about 48 hours if full, about 24 hours if half full, door kept shut. A well packed freezer is its own cold store, which is a quiet argument for keeping yours topped up through winter, even with bags of ice or bread.
• After a long cut: food that still contains ice crystals can be treated as frozen. Food that has fully defrosted should be cooked and eaten within 24 hours or discarded, and raw meat or fish that has thawed must never be refrozen raw. If anything smells wrong or you are unsure how long it was warm, throw it away. No bag of shopping is worth food poisoning.

The discipline part is social, not technical: in the dark, everyone wants to open the fridge to look at it. The household rule, agreed in advance, is that nobody opens either door until the power is back.

Torches, not candles. UK fire and rescue services are blunt about this: house fires rise during power cuts, and a candle knocked over in a dark, unfamiliar room is a classic cause. Battery and rechargeable lighting is brighter, safer and lasts longer. If you do use candles, keep them on a stable heatproof surface, at least a metre from anything above them, away from curtains, never unattended and never overnight.

Warmth without mains heating. Pick the smallest comfortable room, close its door and curtains, and concentrate people there. Layers, hats and hot water bottles outperform heroics. Many gas hobs can still be lit with a match where the manufacturer's instructions allow it, which means hot drinks and hot water bottles are usually still possible in a gas home. For camping stoves, heaters and proper off grid cooking options, see our guide to heating, cooking and lighting off the mains.

The lines you never cross. Never run a petrol or diesel generator indoors, in a garage, in a conservatory or near open windows and vents. Never bring a barbecue, camping stove with charcoal, or patio heater inside, including into a tent or caravan. All of these produce carbon monoxide, which is invisible, odourless and kills people in the UK every winter. Generators live outside, well away from the house, with leads run in through a window you then close as far as possible. A battery powered carbon monoxide alarm costs little and keeps working when the power does not; every home using any fuel burning appliance should have one. If you want serious indoor safe backup power, that is exactly what battery portable power stations are for: silent, fume producing nothing, and legal to run next to the sofa.

Your phone is your lifeline and your biggest battery liability, so triage it.

• Low power mode immediately, screen brightness down, and close the video apps. In a multi phone household, keep one phone on and the rest off, rotating if the cut runs long.
• Text rather than call where possible; texts use less battery and get through on weaker signal.
• Expect mobile signal to degrade in a long cut. Many mobile masts have only limited battery backup, so coverage can shrink hours into a wide area outage, which is precisely when a battery radio and local BBC radio become the reliable information channel.
• Your car is a charger. A phone can be charged from the 12V socket or USB ports, engine running, outside on the drive with the garage door open, never in an enclosed space.
• A charged power bank beats all of it. Something in the 20,000mAh and up class keeps a family connected for days of intermittent use.

One quiet reassurance: your smart meter does not need attention. The display and app will stop updating during the cut, prepayment included, and everything resumes when power returns. The company to contact about a cut is your network operator via 105, not your energy supplier.

Restoration has its own short checklist.

1. Bring things back gradually. Switch appliances on over a few minutes rather than all at once, starting with the fridge and freezer. Check your boiler has restarted and reset any timers and clocks.
2. Judge the food by the clock and the thermometer, using the FSA hours above and the time you noted when the cut began. Fridge above 8C for more than four hours plus food means decisions; a freezer opened never and off for under 24 hours is almost always fine.
3. Recharge and restock the drawer the same day: power banks and lanterns back on charge, used batteries replaced, anything borrowed returned to its place. The kit only works if it is ready before the next storm, not after.
4. Check your compensation position. Under Ofgem's Guaranteed Standards, households are entitled to payments from their network operator for longer cuts. For failures in normal weather you are due 100 pounds once you have been off supply for more than 12 hours (24 hours where 5,000 or more properties are affected), then 45 pounds for each further 12 hours, capped at 400 pounds in large incidents. In severe weather, payments are 90 pounds after 24 hours for a category one storm, or after 48 hours for a category two storm, then 45 pounds for each further six hours, up to 2,235 pounds per event. There is also an extra 100 pounds if you suffer more than four cuts of three hours or more between 1 April and 31 March. Payments are often made automatically after big events, but not always: if nothing arrives, contact your network operator, not your supplier, with the dates and times you noted. Ofgem uprates these amounts with inflation each April, so check its current page when claiming.

The calm answer, from the people who run the grid: nationwide blackouts are not what this winter looks like. NESO, the National Energy System Operator, publishes a Winter Outlook each year, and for winter 2026/27 it forecasts a de-rated margin of around 5.5GW, roughly 8.8% of peak demand, describing it as adequate and in line with recent winters, with demand forecast to be met throughout. Its early summer view used the word comfortable. The tightest days, if they come, are most likely in mid to late January, and tight days mean the grid asking generators for more, not your lights going off. Margins today are stronger than during the 2022 energy crisis winter, when even then no emergency cuts happened.

What actually causes British power cuts is weather, locally: named storms taking lines down, flooding, lightning, and the occasional fault or third party digging through a cable. The Met Office names and warns of these storms days ahead, which is your cue to charge everything and check the drawer. Typical faults are restored within hours; the long multi day outages that make the news are rare, rural and storm driven, and they are exactly what the Priority Services Register, the compensation scheme and the kit in this guide exist for.

So prepare in proportion: not for a national blackout that the system operator does not expect, but for the ordinary, local, dark Tuesday evening that most UK households will meet every few years. Ten minutes of preparation and one well stocked drawer covers it.