Home Emergency Preparedness Checklist

How to use this checklist

Work through the builder a group at a time, not top to bottom. Tick off anything you already own. Most households find they have three of the water items and half the light items in a cupboard already. The progress bar makes that visible, and a kit that is seventy per cent done feels far more achievable than one that looks endless. When only a short list of gaps is left, use each item's link to look at current options and choose what suits your home.

Then print or download the finished list. Keep two copies: one with your documents, one in your car or grab bag. A list that lives only on a dead phone is useless in the moment it matters. Revisit it every season, and after any change in the household. A new baby, a pet, a prescription, a move to a different climate: each one shifts what you need. A list that updates alongside your life is far likelier to be complete when you need it.

One warning the shopping list hides: an unpractised kit is a half kit. Once you own the pieces, spend ten minutes finding them in the dark, charging the power bank, and opening the first-aid kit with cold hands. Knowing where everything is, by feel, is what turns a drawer of purchased items into something you can actually run on a stressful, low-light night.

Tick first, buy second. Almost every kit is closer to complete than it feels.

Water first: the only hard rule

Water is the one thing you cannot negotiate with, and it is where improvised plans come apart. The usual figure is around four litres per person per day. That covers drinking plus basic cooking and washing. Multiply it across a family and even a short horizon, and water quietly becomes the biggest thing in your kit. A household of four planning three days needs on the order of fifty litres. That is why purpose-built storage containers, not a few supermarket bottles, are the honest answer.

Stored water also ages. Sealed commercial water keeps for years. Your own tapped water should be rotated roughly every six months and kept cool, dark and away from chemicals. Storage can fail too — a leak, a dirty container, water needed for something else. That is why purification tablets or a portable filter belong in the kit as a real backup, not an optional extra. The rule to hold: plan to drink what you stored, and plan a way to make more if you cannot.

Do not skip this one: Most people can go three days without food, and only hours without warmth in a bad climate. A household with no safe water and a broken supply is a medical situation, not an inconvenience.

Power and light: match the battery to the load

Portable power is where marketing does the most over-selling. A unit big enough to run a kettle is enormous, heavy and expensive, and almost no one needs one. What most households must keep alive through an outage is a short list: a fridge, a phone, a router, a lamp, and any medical device like a CPAP. Those draw modest, steady power. A mid-sized unit chosen against that list serves far better than a huge one chosen against a headline wattage.

Before you buy, add up the watts of what must keep running, and the hours you want to last. Our power-station runtime calculator does that arithmetic. The best portable power stations guide maps each class of unit to a real household load. For many homes a plain battery bank with a fold-up panel tops the list. It keeps small devices charged for a long time at a fraction of a large unit's weight and cost.

Then treat light as its own need, not a feature of the phone you are saving. A lantern lights a room so a family can move and eat. A headlamp gives each person hands-free light for finding and carrying things. Spare batteries make both dependable. Keep one light where you can reach it in the dark without opening a drawer, and check everything works before the season that needs it.

Size a battery to the devices you must keep alive, then add light and the batteries to run it.

Food and warmth without power

A kitchen without electricity is simply a different kitchen. Plan for food that needs no hob and no fridge. Tinned meals, dried fruit, energy bars, nut butter and shelf-stable milk cover a week with no cooking. Comfort food matters more than people admit when a household is cooped up and worried. Rotate what you normally eat so nothing quietly expires, and keep a few things everyone will actually enjoy.

Warmth is the other quiet need, especially overnight and especially for the very young and very old. Wool or emergency blankets, a warm layer per person and a hat hold body heat better than cranking a failing heater. Staying dry is half of staying warm. And never cook indoors with a barbecue, a camp stove meant for outside, or a generator in the garage. Carbon monoxide is silent and real, and it is the disaster that turns an outage into an emergency.

First aid, air and sanitation

Beyond a stocked first-aid kit, the health layer of a go-bag is personal: your prescriptions, your medical summary, your glasses. Add anything a household member needs that a shop cannot sell off a shelf. Keep a small buffer of any essential medicine. Never let it run to empty. Photograph the prescriptions, so a doctor or pharmacy can reproduce them if the paper is lost.

Air and sanitation fill in the messier reality of several days at home. Dust masks help with smoke, mould and flood debris. Heavy-duty bags and moist towelettes stand in, imperfectly, for a shower and a bin service that have stopped. A simple way to manage the toilet when water is unsafe keeps a growing hygiene problem under control. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is calmer to buy on a good afternoon than to improvise on a bad night.

Documents, signals and the grab bag

The most-complained-about gap after an evacuation is not water or food. It is paperwork. Identity, insurance and ownership records are hard to replace in a week, and cash still works when card readers cannot reach a network. A waterproof bag holding copies of IDs, policies and deeds is one of the highest-value, lowest-cost additions to any kit. Photograph the same documents to a drive so they can be reproduced from wherever you land.

Signals and knowledge close the loop. A wind-up radio carries official warnings when the internet and mobile masts are down. A whistle carries far further than a shouting voice and costs almost nothing. Above all, keep a printed list of who to call and where to meet. Agree it before the event, not during it. Being unable to find one another is the single most disruptive part of an emergency.

Waterproof the paper, carry a way to signal, and agree a meeting point before you ever need it.