What should I do in a power cut?

The street-versus-you check saves both money and time: 105 is the national number that routes to your network operator (not your billing supplier), works from mobiles, and their outage maps and restoration estimates cover you dark-street cases entirely. Nobody should pay a callout for a network fault.

If it is only you, the consumer unit tells the story. A main switch or RCD in the off position with everything else up: reset it once, having first unplugged obvious suspects (anything that was running when the lights went). A single circuit down: same routine at circuit scale, and our tripping guide walks the appliance-elimination process that finds most culprits free.

The one-reset rule exists because protective devices trip for reasons: a device that re-trips immediately has found a persisting fault, and forcing repeated resets pushes fault current through damaged insulation or wet components, enlarging the eventual repair. Leave it off; the rest of the house works.

Preparedness worth having in any older Bristol house: know where the consumer unit is before you need it in the dark, keep a torch near it (not a phone whose battery is the evening's other crisis), and if power cuts affect medical equipment at your address, register with the network operator's Priority Services Register, free and genuinely useful.

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