Power Outage Preparedness: A Practical Checklist

Before an outage happens

• Know where your electrical panel is and how to read it, so you (or an installer) can quickly identify which circuits matter most.
• If you're considering a generator, get a realistic sense of your area's typical outage frequency and duration, this affects both whether a generator makes sense and how it should be sized. City and state pages on this site include real outage-risk context where it's available.
• If anyone in the household depends on electrically powered medical equipment, see our guide on backup power for medical equipment and register with your utility's medical baseline program if one exists.

During an outage

• If you have a standby generator, it should start automatically, if it doesn't, that's the moment routine maintenance would have caught, see our maintenance guide.
• If you have a portable generator, always run it outdoors, well away from windows and doors, carbon monoxide risk is real and it's the most common cause of portable-generator-related injury.
• Avoid opening the refrigerator and freezer more than necessary, food safety guidance generally holds a full freezer stays safe for about 48 hours unopened, a refrigerator considerably less.

After an outage

• If your home has a generator, confirm it shuts back down correctly once utility power returns, this is part of what an automatic transfer switch is for.
• Note anything that went wrong (a circuit that should have stayed on but didn't, a generator that struggled to start) and bring it up with your installer, since that's real, useful information for making sure it's right next time.

Longer term

If repeated outages are pushing you toward a standby system, the generator sizing calculator is a reasonable place to start, followed by getting quotes from license-checked local installers.