Get ‘Blackout Ready’ With These Tips

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MANY of our younger readers may have never experienced a true blackout like those of us who remember the 70s and 80s, but with stark warnings that our energy grid will not be able to cope this winter, that’s all about to change.

These aren’t the fun ‘drank too much’ type of blackouts that we all know and love – this is serious. Here’s some tips that we should all be aware of:

1) Buy earbuds

Blackouts are accompanied by a cacophony of house alarms from around your neighbourhood, ringing and squealing until power is restored. As such, earmuffs or plugs are as essential as torches and candles. Burglars take note, this is the ideal time to do a bit of breaking and entering, so be prepared!

2) Invest in steel-capped boots

With the lights out, it gets dangerous. Particularly when it comes to stubbing toes. Until such a time as energy companies sort their supplies out, maybe it’s safer to clomp around the house like Herman Munster in a pair of work boots.

3) Charge your phone during the day

Many of us only plug in our phones when we go to bed at night but what happens if the power goes off at midnight and stays that way until morning? You don’t want to be in a house with no TV, no internet, no video-games and NO PHONE AS WELL, do you?! A fate worse than death. Charge it up!

4) Get a watch

Not an Apple Watch, not ‘oh the clock on the microwave is always right’, an actual battery operated wristwatch. Because when the blackout hits, the oven, the microwave, your phone, everything will go black and you won’t know what time it is. Seriously, a JCB cut a power cable beside WWN Towers last year and crashed all our computers, and we stayed there for days because none of us could accurately tell if it was time to leave.

5) Only keep what food you can eat in a day

This is a big one, a blackout could lead to any food you have in your fridge or freezer perishing during the outage, so forget about ‘batch cooking’, forget about ‘weekly meal prep’… just keep what you can eat in a day. Bit daft, this one. Who can afford a week’s worth of food these days anyways, right?!

6) Have you considered looting?

Hey baby, the lights are out, there’s nothing to do… how about you and me hit the town and do some sexy looting? Seriously, looting is a surefire way to make a blackout work for you. You could do all your Christmas looting on one night, if the lights go down for long enough. Just remember to use the money you save by stealing stuff to pay your energy bills. We don’t want the energy companies to miss out, do we?

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