It’s every geek, no, every modern day native’s worst nightmare – you wake up or get home from work to discover you are in the midst of a load shedding blackout, or power cut, with end time unknown. Here are some of our top measures you could take to ease the pain while waiting for the lights to come back on and civilisation to return.

Let there be light

The first, and admittedly most obvious, gadget that is essential, particularly if your powercut comes in the evening or late afternoon, is a good torch, or better yet, more than one. The best of these are LED based, as they are last the longest and consume less batteries than their halogen-bulb sporting equivalents. A Joby GorillaTorch is handy and we swear by LED Lensers – the P14 or, if you want something smaller but still almost as bright, the L7 works well – although, you can’t go wrong with a good Maglite either. Just make sure you do not get a rechargeable flashlight though.

Star a fire

Now that you can see where you are walking, your next concern will likely be cooking. Here is where that trusty Weber or a good gas powered camping stove comes into its own, such as the Jetboil Sumo stove (R1 600 from Cape Union Mart). A 1.8 L cooking cup caters to a small family, while it can boil a litre of water in just four minutes, meaning you can have your cup of coffee in no time. If cooking is not your thing, avoid the electric can opener and rather have a working manual one at hand. You’ll thank us for correcting the oversight.

Keep your cool

Alas, it’s not unheard of that load shedding, or worse, power cuts could last days (City Power places the estimate for the latter between three and five days). Forget about your fridge, in these instances what you need is a decent cooler. Enter the Coleman 58 Quart Xtreme 6-Day Cooler (R1 300 from Cape Union Mart), which can hold up to 75 cans worth in volume and keep the precious contents cool even when the temperatures soar up to 32⁰ C, due to its extra ThermOZONE insulation. It’s also readily transportable, thanks to two-way handles.

Battery on demand

With the essentials sorted, now your attention may well turn to business or pleasure. For either, you are probably going to want to power up your notebook/tablet/smartphone/favourite electronic ‘toy’ and try get at least something 21^st century done. Firstly, it’s essential to keep all devices’ batteries charged before crises strike. In the inevitability of your device’s battery running low, an extremely handy device to have at the ready is a decent portable power pack, or solar powered chargers, such as the Powergorilla (for notebooks and R3 200),  Minigorilla (for smaller gadgets and R1 800) or the Solargorilla (R2 800) from Powertraveller and available locally from Wintec Solutions. Also, invest in a decent car-charger – in a pinch it can at least give your smartphone (which inexplicably drains its battery three to four times faster when the power is out) a little boost.