UK RESILIENCE MAN

Power & Light for 72 Hours

When the power goes out, most households last about 20 minutes before realising how unprepared they really are. Phones die, rooms go dark, heating stops, cooking becomes difficult, and even boiling the kettle becomes impossible.

The goal here isn’t to turn anyone into a hobby prepper; it’s simply to give an ordinary household the ability to cope for 72 hours.

Below is the minimum practical setup, written for someone starting from zero.

Why power and light matter

A 72-hour outage is one of the most common “serious but survivable” disruptions in the UK. It can follow:

  • Severe weather
  • Grid failures
  • Local infrastructure damage
  • Storms knocking out overhead lines

For those three days, you need:

  • Light (to move around safely and reduce stress)
  • Power (to keep phones charged for news and emergencies)
  • Reliable ways to see and communicate in the dark

This is not about becoming off-grid, it’s about avoiding chaos.

72 hours of light

There are two slightly different needs to cover with emergency lighting.

  • Task lighting (to see something you’re working on or worried about)
  • Ambient lighting (to see the room and do everyday tasks)

Task lighting

For this you need a torch or a headlamp.

A handheld torch is simpler and usually brighter for the price, and you can point it exactly where you need without thinking. It’s ideal for checking the fuse box, looking under a bed, or lighting a specific corner. The downside is that it occupies one of your hands, which becomes awkward the moment you need both for something practical, whether that’s carrying water, cooking, or dealing with a minor household issue.

A headlamp solves that problem completely by giving you hands-free light that moves naturally with your line of sight. It’s unbeatable for walking around safely in a dark house, working on small tasks, or doing anything that requires both hands. The compromise is that headlamps can be slightly less powerful at the budget end, and not everyone likes wearing a strap around their head indoors. If you aren’t used to wearing one, getting it to light exactly what you want is awkward.

Both work, and you can use either, but you need at least one.

Ambient lighting

Here there are a few practical options: LED lanterns, string lights and candles.

LED lanterns are the most reliable choice. They light an entire room evenly, don’t get hot, and are safe to leave on a table while you move around.

String lights are another surprisingly good option. They’re cheap, gentle on the eyes, and give enough background light to stop the house feeling gloomy without draining batteries quickly.

Candles work, but they come with obvious fire risks, especially during a stressful or unfamiliar situation, and they give off weaker light than people remember. They also give a little heat, often enough to take the edge off a cold room. You may still want to go down this route if you already have plenty of candles. If so, make sure you have a couple of cheap lighters in your kit too.

For a simple 72-hour kit, an LED lantern is the best ‘set it down and forget it’ option, with string lights as a nice supplementary choice if you want to soften the mood or light an awkward staircase.

Rechargables or batteries

In times gone by torches and other light sources would have required batteries. These days we tend to use rechargable items that we plug in via USB. There are advantages in both.

USB-rechargeable devices are convenient because you can top them up from a powerbank, which means you only need to keep one thing charged rather than juggling packs of AA and AAA batteries. However, if your powerbank runs flat, every rechargeable item in the house dies with it. Let’s face it, everyone’s going to want to keep their phone charged and may not want to use powerbanks for lighting.

Traditional battery-powered gear avoids that problem entirely. As long as you have a spare batteries, your light will work, and replacements can be bought almost anywhere. The trade-off is needing to manage those batteries, storing them properly, keeping them fresh, and checking expiry dates.

For a simple 72-hour kit, either approach works, but many households benefit from a mix: a rechargeable lantern you can top up easily, backed by at least one torch that runs on common batteries so you always have a fallback.

Phone torches

We generally have our phones with us all the time and the immediate go to light source will be the torch on our phones. This is fine for short periods, but if we exhaust our phone battery we lose a valuable potential source of communication, as well as anything have stored on the phone, even if there is no signal. This being so, it’s a good idea not to rely on our phone torches as a light source, at least not after the initial few minutes of a power outage.

Key fob torches and similar

These are very useful for occasional use in our everyday lives, such as navigating a dark staircase or finding something that was dropped at night. But the batteries won’t last long with sustained use and the torch doesn’t give off much light, and often requires continual holding of a button or suchlike. Worth having for sure, but it doesn’t count as your light source for our purposes here.

Keep your phone charged

We can talk about charging your phone in a crisis, but an easy way to be a step ahead is to get used to plugging in your phone when you sit down. Try to have a charger lead where you usually sit, where you do the dishes, near your bed, and so on. Try to keep your phone mostly charged, most of the time. That way, when the power goes down, you aren’t already panicking about getting that charged % up.

Charging your phone in a crisis

As part of your 72-hour preparedness kit, you should keep at least one fully charged powerbank. These are inexpensive, widely available on the high street, and you may already have one. The key change is simple: keep it topped up. If you own more than one, rotate them every week or two so each gets used occasionally as lithium batteries stay healthier that way.

In a power cut, don’t burn through your phone battery. Switch to low-power mode, dim the screen, close background apps, and avoid streaming or scrolling. Use your phone deliberately: check updates, send necessary messages, then turn the screen off again. A single powerbank can last the full 72 hours if you’re careful.

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