No power planning for businesses
How to prepare your business for power outages.
Ensure your business is prepared for an electricity outage, whether it be a planned or unplanned one.
Check your terms and conditions with your electricity retailer – it will detail notification periods for planned electricity network outages and any compensation clauses. Consider checking with your insurance provider – how long does power need to be off before the policy covers you?
Please note – MainPower does not supply businesses with generators for planned or unplanned outages. To ensure continuity, it is the responsibility of the business to have a ‘no power plan’ in place. Please speak to your electrician for more information on hiring a generator for an outage.
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Communication
- Have a good back up plan and ensure your staff are trained.
- Keep a transistor radio handy and store with spare batteries.
- Keep mobile phones charged and have a fully charged battery pack for device charging.
Business Functionality
- Consider the use of manual eftpos and credit card options.
- Can your site be supplied by a generator – know your capacity requirements, connection options and generator hire contact details.
- If you have electric gates or doors into your place of work, be prepared by knowing how to manually override it.
- Have back up alternative locations to work from and phone diversions to mobiles contingency in place and when the power comes back on, understand what equipment needs resetting.
Water, Heat & Lighting
- If your business is based in a rural area, when the power is off, your water pump might not work. To ensure you have adequate supplies, be prepared by storing emergency water supplies for drinking.
- If you don’t have access to water in a power outage, keep a bottle of sanitizer handy for bathroom and food handling needs.
- Depending on the time of year, keep blankets/extra jumper handy in case you are left without a heat source.
- Be prepared with battery-operated lighting (where applicable).
Protection
- Consider using a surge protection to protect all appliances within your business, such as computers, to protect the appliances from power interruption.
- If you have a business alarm, consider checking with your commercial alarm provider to ensure you have a backup battery supply during an outage.
- As part of your Health and Safety at work you should already have a First Aid Kit handy along with your accident and incident book.
- Consider if you need a generator. Stuck as to what size meets your requirements? Simply ask a local electrician would be able to assess and advise you.
Outage factsheets
Usefull factsheets and information for planning for an outage.
This fact sheet is designed to inform you about using generators
safely in the event of a power outage.
We’re here to help
If you need some assistance or advice, please get in touch with our team.
