5 things that help you get through a multi-day blackout in a flat

A full battery is infrastructure. The window between a storm warning and the lights actually going out is usually a few hours, and almost nobody uses it. Your phone at 100% buys you two days of careful use; at 40% it is gone by tomorrow morning. The same logic applies to your laptop, which doubles as a charging hub for everything else once the power is out. The regret of a power bank sitting at 34% when the lights go out is very specific and very avoidable.

Every time you open the fridge door you bleed cold air you cannot get back. A fully stocked, closed fridge holds a safe temperature for about four hours after power loss; a full freezer holds for 24 to 48 hours. The mistake almost everyone makes is opening the fridge in the first hour to 'check on things' — exactly when the food is still fine and the cold air is most worth preserving. The goal is to treat that door as sealed until you have a specific plan for what you are grabbing.

Most urban flats keep tap water even during a blackout — water runs on separate infrastructure — but booster pumps in taller buildings do run on electricity, and if there is a related infrastructure failure, water can go off without warning and faster than you would expect. More practically, a bathtub holds 150 to 300 litres, which covers flushing, washing up, and basic hygiene for two or three days at no cost whatsoever. The time to fill it is before the outage, not when you are already in the dark wondering why nothing is coming out of the tap.

Candles are genuinely pleasant for about 40 minutes and then become a low-grade anxiety because you cannot leave them unattended, they drip, and they are a real fire risk in a stressed household — especially with children or pets. A modern LED camping lantern gives more usable light than six candles, runs for 40-plus hours on a set of AA batteries, can be hung from a door hook or curtain rail, and you can walk away from it. The reason people default to candles is that they already own them; the reason a lantern is worth the upgrade is that it removes an entire category of worry from an already stressful situation. If you can, choose one with a warm-toned LED rather than a blue-white one — after several hours in a small room, the difference is noticeable.

This gets left off every preparedness list because it sounds soft, but by hour 14 of a blackout the psychological wear is real. Anxiety spikes when you cannot work, cannot scroll, and cannot distract yourself with your usual habits. The people who get through multi-day outages most easily are almost always the ones with an absorbing offline activity — a novel they have been meaning to read, a card game, a puzzle, something with their hands. It is not about being stoic; it is about having your attention somewhere other than the hum of the missing electricity. There is also a practical dimension: less phone use means longer battery life.