Keeping Pets Safe Through Load Shedding and Power Failures

Extended power outages create a set of specific problems for pet owners that are easy to overlook until the schedule changes or a storm takes out the grid for two days.

Most of it is manageable with a bit of planning.

Temperature

Heat is the serious one. A house without fans or air conditioning in a Highveld or Lowveld summer becomes dangerous quickly, particularly for:

• Flat-faced breeds — pugs, bulldogs, boxers, Persians — which cannot cool themselves efficiently
• Overweight animals
• Elderly animals
• Animals with heart or respiratory disease
• Thick-coated breeds

What to do:

• Ensure shade and airflow. Open windows on both sides for cross-ventilation, with security in mind.
• Multiple water bowls, in the shade, filled before the outage. Add ice if you have it.
• Freeze plastic bottles of water in advance and lay them wrapped in a towel where the animal can lie against them.
• Wet a towel and lay it on a tiled floor.
• Move animals to the coolest room — usually tiled, north-facing avoided, ground floor.
• Never leave them in a closed car or a closed room without ventilation.

Watch for heatstroke: heavy panting that doesn't settle, drooling, bright red or very pale gums, wobbliness, vomiting, collapse. This is an emergency — start cooling with cool (not ice-cold) water, get airflow onto them, and go to a vet immediately.

Cold matters too on a Highveld winter night without heating. Old, thin, small or short-coated dogs feel it. Provide thick bedding off the floor, a coat, and a warm room. Hot water bottles wrapped in a towel work, provided they can move away from them.

Refrigerated medication

This catches people out. Insulin is the main one, and diabetic pets are entirely dependent on it.

• A closed fridge holds temperature for several hours. Don't open it during an outage.
• For longer outages, use a cooler box with ice packs. Insulin should be kept cool but not frozen — freezing destroys it. Don't let the vial sit directly against an ice pack.
• Keep a thermometer in the cooler if you're managing this regularly.
• If you're unsure whether medication has been compromised, ask your vet or pharmacist rather than guessing.

Other medications that may need refrigeration: some eye drops, certain reconstituted antibiotics, some specialist products. Check the label.

Aquariums and reptiles

Often the most vulnerable, and frequently forgotten.

Fish: filtration and aeration stop, and oxygen depletes. A battery-operated air pump is a genuinely worthwhile purchase. Don't feed during an outage — uneaten food fouls the water and consumes oxygen. Insulate the tank with blankets to hold temperature.

Reptiles and amphibians: heat is life-critical. Wrap the vivarium in blankets, use chemical hand warmers or hot water bottles wrapped in towelling placed outside the enclosure, and monitor with a thermometer. A UPS or small inverter dedicated to a heat mat is worth considering for valuable or delicate species.

Anxiety

Some animals are frightened by:

• The sudden darkness
• Alarm systems beeping or triggering
• Generators, particularly noisy petrol ones
• Inverters clicking over
• The change in household routine

What helps:

• Battery lanterns or rechargeable lights in the rooms they use
• Keeping the routine unchanged — feeding times, walk times
• Staying calm yourself. Animals read your response.
• A safe space — a covered crate, a familiar room
• Introducing generator noise gradually rather than starting it for the first time during a storm
• For genuinely anxious animals, speak to your vet about options

Security

An important consideration in South Africa specifically. Outages affect electric fencing, gates and alarms.

• Check whether your gate has a manual release, and know how to use it in the dark. Practise once.
• Electric fencing often has battery backup, but check it's functioning.
• Automatic gates that fail open are a real escape risk. Know the state your gate defaults to.
• Ensure pets have ID — collar tag with your number, and an up-to-date microchip registration. Outages and open gates are a common cause of lost pets.
• Be careful about pets escaping through doors left open for ventilation.

Emergency vet access

• Know which emergency practices have generators. Most established ones do, but it's worth confirming.
• Keep your phone charged — a power bank is essential.
• Save the numbers offline. Don't rely on searching during an outage with patchy signal.
• Keep fuel in the car. Petrol stations may be affected too.

The preparation list

Worth having ready:

• Rechargeable lights or battery lanterns
• A power bank, charged
• Cooler box and ice packs
• Frozen water bottles in the freezer
• Battery air pump, if you keep fish
• A manual gate release you know how to operate
• A stocked pet first aid kit
• A written list of emergency numbers, on paper
• Bottled water, if you're on a borehole or a pump-dependent supply
• Spare pet food — don't let stocks run to zero

Water

Where water supply depends on an electric pump, outages can mean no water. Keep a few litres set aside specifically for the animals, and fill containers before scheduled outages.

The routine that helps most

If outages are scheduled in your area, set a reminder for thirty minutes before:

• Fill water bowls
• Cool the house or warm it, depending on season
• Charge the power bank
• Check the fridge is closed
• Feed if it's near feeding time

Members set these as recurring prompts in our community app alongside the daily feed, water and play reminders — which is genuinely useful when the schedule shifts and the mental checklist goes with it.

Most of this is straightforward. The failures happen when nobody thought about it in advance, and the animal most at risk is nearly always the diabetic one, the flat-faced one, or the one behind a gate that failed open.