Sheltering in Place: Pets Through Power Outages

In a power outage you usually shelter in place, and the job is to keep your animals safe without electricity. Work out which of your animals’ needs actually depend on grid power (an aquarium pump, reptile heat, refrigerated medication, a well pump) and back up each one separately. Handle two dangers first: carbon monoxide from generators, and heatstroke if the air conditioning is gone. This page is the hub for that job, with a short guide to each piece and links to the deeper guide on each.

Act now: the two risks that cannot wait

Carbon monoxide. Generators, camp stoves and grills run outdoors only, and the distance is the part people skip. Ready.gov says: “Generators and fuel should always be used outdoors and at least 20 feet away from windows, doors and attached garages.” The CPSC adds that the exhaust should face away from the home. FEMA’s generator fact sheet publishes no distance figure, but says a generator never runs indoors or in a partially enclosed space, including a home, garage or crawl space, “even those areas with partial ventilation,” and that fans will not prevent carbon monoxide from building up.

The CPSC counts an average of nearly 100 US deaths a year from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators. Three limits apply to that number. It is a 2019-2021 annual average, not a count for any one year. It is a statistical estimate scaled to death-certificate data, from CPSC’s February 2025 report, and recent years in that series are preliminary and typically revised upward. And it covers consumer portable generators only, so fire-caused CO, motor-vehicle CO, work-related incidents and the built-in generators on RVs and boats sit outside it. A figure of about 85 that you may see was CPSC’s number for 2017-2019, from a different report series that counted reported incidents; it has been superseded, and the trend has moved up.

Pets are vulnerable to the same gas. The ASPCA lists depression, vomiting, weakness, coma, seizures, difficulty breathing and cardiac arrhythmias as CO poisoning signs in animals, and flags birds as especially vulnerable because of their respiratory systems. Ready.gov calls carbon monoxide “a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you, your family and pets.”

If you suspect CO exposure in a pet, get the animal to fresh air and call an emergency vet immediately. The ASPCA notes recovery can require monitoring for delayed neurological effects for 3 to 6 or more days.

Heatstroke. If the outage takes your air conditioning and your pet shows excessive panting, drooling, unsteadiness or collapse, abnormal gum color or unusual anxiousness, that is an emergency-vet-now situation, not a wait-and-see one. Cornell’s veterinary college describes heatstroke as a medical emergency that can cause severe organ damage and death without access to shade, water and rest.

Overweight pets and short-nosed (brachycephalic) breeds carry higher risk. A peer-reviewed evidence review reports that in one study it assesses, brachycephalic dogs had roughly 1.3 times the odds of exertional heat-related illness and roughly 2.4 times the odds of environmental heat-related illness compared with mesocephalic dogs. A separate study in the same review found no significant difference in mortality between brachycephalic and non-brachycephalic dogs once a dog was affected. Those are two different studies, not one finding cutting both ways.

Cats show heat stress more subtly than dogs. Hiding, restlessness, drooling, panting, warm ears and seeking cool surfaces like tile or a sink are early signs worth acting on.

If either applies right now, stop reading and act. The rest of this page is preparation.

Shelter in place or evacuate

A power outage by itself is a shelter-in-place situation. Ready.gov’s power-outage guidance is built around managing without electricity at home, not leaving. That changes when the outage is a symptom of something bigger, such as a wildfire that knocked out lines, a hurricane or a gas leak. Then you follow the evacuation order for the underlying hazard.

Ready.gov’s own instructions can pull in different directions. Its shelter page says to bring your family and pets inside, to lock doors and close windows, air vents and fireplace dampers, and to turn off fans, air conditioning and forced-air heating. That is sound if you are sealing the house against smoke or an airborne contaminant. A plain outage is the opposite problem: the AC and forced-air heat are already off, and a sealed house with no climate control is the setup that raises heatstroke risk for an at-risk pet. Read the hazard you are actually facing before defaulting to a generic checklist step.

If your pet has a heart or respiratory condition, is a senior, or is a brachycephalic breed, talk to your veterinarian ahead of time about how much heat or cold that animal can tolerate without climate control. This page can flag general risk factors; your vet knows the individual animal.

Which outage clock this page runs on

Four situations get filed under power outage, and they differ in how much warning you get and how long you must hold. A household that runs a three-day protocol against a three-week problem has made a serious planning error.

This page covers the unannounced outage, lasting hours to a few days. Nobody warned you, the power is off, and restoration is expected inside the window your stored water and battery gear can cover.

A weeks-long outage is a different planning tier, not a longer version of this one. The US Energy Information Administration reports that US electricity customers averaged 11 hours of interruptions across 2024, nearly twice the annual average of the decade before, with major events accounting for about 80 percent of those hours. Interruptions not tied to a major event routinely average about two hours a year. The national mean is the wrong planning number because the damage is concentrated: South Carolina customers averaged nearly 53 hours in 2024, driven largely by Hurricane Helene. When restoration is measured in weeks, the constraints become refrigerated medication over a month, fuel when stations cannot pump, and resupply when roads are the bottleneck. The decision at that tier is whether to relocate the animal instead of powering it through. Our weeks-long outage pet plan covers it.

A scheduled shutoff runs backward from a notice, and the notice is not guaranteed. A Public Safety Power Shutoff is a utility deliberately turning off power in a fire-risk area during dangerous weather. How much warning you get depends on your utility, and every utility warns the alert may not arrive: PG&E’s page says in some cases it may not send the first alert until the same day the power is shut off. The same wind-and-heat conditions can also trigger a wildfire evacuation order. Our PSPS pet countdown protocol sets four published notification ladders side by side and builds the pet checklist from the last rung backward.

A staged grid alert starts before the power goes, and it is lead time you can spend. ERCOT, CAISO, PJM and MISO each publish their own staged public alert before reserves run out, with a different name and threshold at each operator, so look up the one that covers your address. Our grid alert stages and pet power needs guide lays out all four ladders, corrects the common mix-up between a voluntary conservation appeal and a declared emergency alert, and ties a pet action to every stage. Charging the power station, pre-cooling the room, filling water containers and topping off a battery air pump belong in that window.

Everything below is written for the first clock.

What actually depends on power

Most of what people worry about during an outage does not need backup power. Four things do, and each has a different fix:

Dependency	What fails without power	What it needs
Aquarium	Pump stops oxygenating and circulating water; heater stops maintaining temperature	Battery-backup air pump (oxygenation); insulation and monitoring (temperature)
Reptile enclosure	Heat source shuts off	Insulation, regular temperature checks, purpose-built heat pack if needed
Refrigerated medication	Fridge temperature rises after about 4 hours (door closed)	Vet or manufacturer call, not a guessed timeline
Well pump (electric)	Pump stops; water pressure and safety degrade	Stored water in advance, or a generator or backup power tied to the pump

Sources: Aquarium Co-Op power-outage guide; Veterinary Center for Birds and Exotics (Dr. Laurie Hess, DVM); CDC food-safety guidance; PrivateWellClass.org; Michigan EGLE private water supply emergency fact sheet. The two well sources disagree about drawing the pressure tank, and the well section below publishes both positions.

HVAC-dependent pets belong on this list too, but the fix is behavioral and monitoring-based (moving the pet to the coolest or warmest room, watching for the warning signs above), not a piece of gear, so it is covered in the heatstroke section.

No single authority (Ready.gov, AVMA or the ASPCA) publishes a dedicated pets-during-a-power-outage page the way they do for hurricanes or wildfires. The aquarium, reptile and well-pump guidance here comes from manufacturer, retailer, industry and veterinary sources, cited by name so you can check them.

Aquariums: oxygen first, temperature second

The more time-sensitive problem in most tanks is oxygenation. A battery-backup air pump keeps water circulating and oxygenated while the power is out. Two options at different runtime tiers:

• Aquarium Co-Op’s battery-backup air pump switches to its internal lithium-ion battery the moment power drops and runs 20 hours in continuous mode or up to 40 hours in power-save mode (15-second on/off cycling), per the manufacturer’s product page.
• Penn-Plax’s Air Pod runs on 4 D-cell batteries and is rated, per a retailer spec page, for up to 150 hours of continuous operation on tanks up to 55 gallons. That is the longer runtime, but the figure comes from a retailer, not Penn-Plax’s own site.

Temperature is the second half of the problem and less urgent in most households: rooms do not lose heat as fast as a tank loses oxygen circulation. Tropical species are more sensitive to a temperature drop than hardier ones. A heated tropical tank through a multi-day outage is a case for the portable power station route below, since a heater draws far more power than an air pump.

Reptiles: insulate first, add heat carefully

Dr. Laurie Hess, DVM, of the Veterinary Center for Birds and Exotics, says reptiles can tolerate brumation-level cold “for a few days” in the short term, though prolonged cold still carries real illness risk. This is not an immediate crisis the way a tank losing oxygen can be. Tropical species are more heat-sensitive than desert species. The steps:

1. Insulate the enclosure with blankets or towels to slow heat loss. This is physics, not a published protocol; none of the sources here publishes a reptile-enclosure insulation rule.
2. Check the temperature with a thermometer, not by feel. PetMD’s veterinary write-up on reptile hypothermia (Sean Perry, DVM) says temperature guns read habitat and body-surface temperatures reliably and recommends keeping a log of habitat temperatures. No source publishes a check-every-hour rule, so pick a cadence you will keep and write the readings down.
3. Watch for cold-stress signs. PetMD lists lethargy, decreased activity, decreased appetite and increased sleeping. It says the closer a reptile’s body temperature gets to freezing (32°F), the more of a medical emergency it is. Call your veterinarian rather than warming the animal quickly, because PetMD warns that a reptile warmed too fast can suffer life-threatening complications.

If the outage runs long enough that supplemental heat is needed, use a purpose-built reptile heat pack, not an open flame and not a generic human hand warmer.

Where we disagree with Petco. Petco calls chemical hand warmers “an excellent and inexpensive way to provide quick heat for your reptile.” We disagree, for two reasons. The first is design intent, not a clean temperature gap. Pangea Reptile publishes about 110°F at the surface for its 40-hour pack. HotHands publishes an average of 135°F and a maximum of 158°F. UniHeat’s own chart for its 40-hour shipping warmer peaks just under its 150°F gridline, which is in HotHands’ range, not below it. What separates the products is what each is sold to do: one to hold a temperature around a shipped animal for days, the other to deliver a short burst of heat into a glove. Design for the highest published figure. Our heat pack runtime page carries every published figure. The second reason is air. HotHands says its warmers make heat “through oxidation when exposed to air”, and Pangea says the red-striped face of its pack “must always be exposed to air”, so a sealed or tightly wrapped enclosure is the wrong place for either.

Whichever type you use, never let it rest against the animal or directly against the enclosure glass. Glass conducts a hot spot straight through to whatever lies on the other side, and HotHands’ published temperatures run well above anything reptile skin should touch. Buffer it with a towel or insulation.

The hand-warmer caution applies even harder to a newborn litter, which cannot move away from a hot spot. If a nursing mother and neonates are riding out the outage, evacuating a pregnant or nursing pet covers the ambient-temperature targets with and without the dam present, and why the mother is the safest heat source you have.

Refrigerated medication: call, don’t guess

If your pet takes a medication that needs refrigeration (insulin is the most common example), call your veterinarian or the medication’s manufacturer when the power goes out. Temperature tolerance varies by drug and formulation, and no pet-specific authority publishes one universal number for how long a medication stays safe once refrigeration stops.

As a general food-safety proxy only, CDC says a refrigerator holds safe temperature for about 4 hours with the door closed, and a full freezer holds 48 hours (24 hours if half-full). Keep the door closed as much as possible. Use the call to find out what that window means for your pet’s prescription. This page does not give a number to act on instead of that call.

The pet food in the same refrigerator is a separate question, and those elapsed-time figures do not settle it either. Pet food after a flood or outage sets out which published rule belongs to which food, why an appliance-thermometer or food-thermometer reading beats a clock for anything you feed an animal, and why frozen raw is its own case.

Well water: the fix is storage

An electric well pump stops the instant the power does. A pressure tank holds a small residual volume, and the sources disagree about whether you may draw it. PrivateWellClass.org says: “If you have a pressure tank, you can use the water in it.” It notes the tank should have a faucet near the bottom. Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy says the opposite for extended outages: withdrawing water while the power is out “depressurizes the system and increases the risk of contamination.” Its fact sheet warns: “The water can become contaminated without any noticeable change in taste, odor, or clarity.” You cannot check it by looking at the bowl.

Michigan adds that if the system was depressurized during an outage or the well flooded, “the water should not be consumed until testing has verified that it is potable (fit to drink).” Its clearance standard is two consecutive samples, collected 8 hours apart, with no coliform bacteria. A household that empties its tank on the first night is therefore not back to normal when the power returns. Neither document is written about animals, so applying either to a pet’s bowl is our own extension.

So do not lean on the well mid-outage. Keep enough drinking water on hand for every person and pet, refreshed on a regular schedule. For a household on a well long-term, PrivateWellClass.org recommends a backup power source such as a generator or solar panels connected to the pump. Electric well pump and pet water publishes what such a pump draws, why voltage rather than wattage is usually the binding constraint, and the full disagreement between the two sources.

Backup power, sized to the job

Backup power is not one purchase. A CO alarm and a phone charger need almost nothing. An aquarium heater or a mini fridge needs real wattage. Sizing wrong means paying for capacity you do not need or running out when it matters.

Three options at a glance. For the full comparison and our best-overall pick across five stations, including the EcoFlow RIVER 2 Pro, see portable power stations for pets.

Low-draw and higher-draw examples are worth sizing separately. A heated pet bed (4-7W) or heated water bowl (12-25W) sips power for days even on the smallest station here, a summer box fan (roughly 67W) runs 10+ hours on a mid-size station, and a small space heater (900-1500W) drains the same battery in about two hours or less. The worked math is in the power stations guide. Without a power station, a battery-powered crate fan (a pick on our pet heat wave safety guide) runs a crate’s airflow off D-cell batteries, though it moves air without cooling it below room temperature.

Product	Capacity	Continuous output	Best for
Jackery Explorer 300 Plus	288Wh	300W	CO alarm, phone charging, small aquarium air pump
Jackery Explorer 1000 v2	1070Wh	1500W	Mini fridge + aquarium heater + one medical-class device
EcoFlow DELTA 2	1024Wh	1800W	Similar to the Jackery 1000 v2, with slightly more output headroom

Sources: Jackery and EcoFlow product listings, cited per product in the spec cards below.

None of these replaces a generator for whole-home or extended multi-day needs. They keep specific animal-dependent devices running. Whole-home backup is a licensed-electrician conversation about a transfer switch and a properly sized generator. Match the tool to the dependency, not to the largest capacity you can justify, and know which load you would shed first if the battery ran low. For consumables, the pet emergency supply calculator takes species, weight and headcount and returns water, food and litter quantities; the rest of the set is on the tools index.

A generator is never a shortcut around the carbon monoxide rule above. Outdoors only, 20 feet minimum from windows, doors and attached garages, exhaust facing away. The rule does not relax because the outage is long or the weather is bad.

The pet camera chain: three systems, not one

A camera is the first thing many owners reach for when they cannot get home, and in an outage it is among the least reliable. Watching an animal remotely depends on three systems in series, and a better camera fixes only the first.

The camera needs power. A mains-powered camera or plug-in doorbell is off the instant the outage starts. A battery model keeps running, but running is not the same as reporting.

Your network needs power. The router and modem are ordinary mains-powered appliances. When they stop, a charged camera has nowhere to send anything. Google’s Nest support documentation says a camera must be connected to both Wi-Fi and the Nest service to upload video, and that the Nest cameras and doorbells it lists hold up to one hour of events in internal memory, uploaded and cleared once the device reconnects. An hour of buffered clips helps after the fact. It is not a live view of your dog at hour six.

The internet service needs power you do not control. The equipment between your house and the internet has its own power supply and failure mode. The federal rule people reach for is narrower than assumed, and it has expired. 47 CFR 9.20 applied to facilities-based fixed residential voice service that is not line powered. It required the provider to offer for sale at least one option with a minimum of eight hours of standby backup power and, from February 13, 2019, one with at least twenty-four hours. That was an obligation to sell you a battery for equipment inside your home, written around voice service, not broadband. The section’s own sunset paragraph ended those requirements as of September 1, 2025, and the FCC has since assigned the section number to an unrelated 911 reliability rule effective August 10, 2026. Ask your own provider what happens to your service when the neighborhood loses power, and what backup sits on the equipment feeding your street.

Manufacturers publish the limits of their own backup layers. Ring says the Alarm Pro base station’s internal battery can last up to 24 hours in Low Power Mode, in which most functions and Wi-Fi are disabled, leaving arming, disarming and professional monitoring dispatch on a compatible subscription. Each Ring Power Pack provides up to eight hours of backup power, with up to three connected. Its cellular backup service on a compatible subscription includes 3 GB of cellular data a month, shared across the month, not reserved for one bad night.

A camera helps in an outage only if all three links are backed up, and most households back up one. If you want the camera to know whether an animal is in trouble while you are away, the purchases that survive an outage need no network: a battery-backup air pump that switches itself on, a thermometer with a local audible alarm, and a person nearby who has a key and knows where the carriers are. The apartment building pet buddy system covers setting up that last one before you need it, including what the neighbor needs to be told.

Household power-outage checklist

Work through this before the next outage, not during it.

• Battery backup for CO detectors. Ready.gov calls this out: a CO alarm that needs grid power is useless during the event most likely to produce carbon monoxide risk (generator or alternate heat use).
• Know your aquarium’s actual dependency. Oxygenation is more urgent than temperature in most tanks; size your backup to that.
• Have a reptile heat pack on hand if you keep a heat-dependent species, and know the buffering rule (never touching the glass) before you need it at 2 a.m.
• Call your vet now, not during the outage, about any refrigerated medication’s tolerance for a temperature excursion.
• Store drinking water for every person and pet if your home is on a well. Michigan EGLE tells well owners to “refrain from opening faucets, taking showers, or flushing toilets” during extended outages. Stored water is the answer, not the tap.
• Confirm your generator placement plan (20 feet, outdoors, exhaust away from the home) before you have to set it up in the dark.
• Know your pet’s individual heat and cold risk factors (brachycephalic breed, senior, heart or respiratory condition) and ask your vet about that animal’s tolerance.
• Find out which grid operator serves you and what its staged alerts are called, so a warning stage reads as lead time. In a shutoff area, sign up for the utility’s notifications and do not assume the first one arrives days ahead.
• Decide now what your camera is for. If it is your only way to know an animal is in trouble while you are out, back up the router and modem too, or arrange a person with a key.

Want the evacuation go-bag list on paper too? Get the free printable go-bag checklist.

Every guide under this hub

This page covers the household-level decisions. The guides below are grouped by what fails.

Choosing and sizing backup power

• Best portable power stations for pets: stations compared on manufacturer Wh and watt specs, with runtime math for aquarium pumps, reptile heat mats and mini-fridges.
• Jackery versus EcoFlow: the two compared on pet-only loads.
• Quiet generator versus power station: carbon monoxide risk, noise stress, runtime, and which is the safer pick for a household with animals.
• Solar charger versus power bank: keeping a GPS tracker, aquarium pump or medical device running.
• Generator sizing for pet loads: running watts, surge watts and a fuel runway built from your own equipment’s nameplates.

Generators and carbon monoxide

• Generators, carbon monoxide, and pets: the CPSC 20-foot rule, CO alarm placement, and the vet-sourced symptoms that mean go to emergency care now.

Heat, when the air conditioning is gone

• Dog cooling gear during an outage: gear sorted by power source, from zero-power mats to battery fans.
• Cooling vest versus cooling mat: an evaporative vest needs dry air and airflow; a gel mat needs no power.
• Battery-powered fan for a pet carrier during an outage: the confined-pet case, runtime figures, rechargeable versus D-cell, safe clamp placement and chew hazards.

Cold, and the loads that keep an animal warm

No outage-specific cold guide is filed under this hub yet, so the reptile and aquarium temperature guidance above carries that ground. The seasonal pages under the playbooks hub cover the weather side: winter storm pet prep for the household, and outdoor working dogs in extreme cold for animals that live outside the heated envelope.

Refrigerated medication

• Pet medication and refrigeration: what manufacturer labels say about insulin and other refrigerated meds, cold-chain gear, and when to call your vet.
• Insulin coolers for a diabetic pet: storage temperatures, cooler classes sorted by runtime, and questions to bring to your vet.
• Pet insulin storage: what each label says: what the manufacturers’ labels say about time outside the fridge.

Tanks, enclosures and powered devices

• Aquariums and reptiles in an outage: staged timelines, battery air pumps, heat packs and vet-sourced cold thresholds.
• Heat pack runtime for a reptile enclosure: every published duration, surface temperature and peak time set side by side, including where publishers disagree about the same pack.
• Reef tank power outage: what to power first: flow before light, and how publishers disagree about a reef tank’s clock.
• Auto feeders and water fountains: which keep running on battery backup, how long that lasts, and the no-power fallback.
• When an auto feeder becomes a liability, filed under the playbooks hub: the reliance problem for a household that leaves an animal on a timer.

Food, when the refrigerator and freezer warm

No outage-specific pet-food guide is filed under this hub yet. Is pet food safe after a flood or outage, under the kits hub, sets out which published save-or-discard rule belongs to which food, and why a thermometer reading beats an elapsed-time count for anything you feed an animal.

Water, when the pump stops

The well-pump section above is this hub’s own coverage, and electric well pump and pet water goes further: drawdown gallons by tank model, what a well pump draws in watts, and why the power stations and generators this site recommends elsewhere cannot start a 230-volt pump. For quantity and treatment, see how much water per dog in an emergency and water purification for pets.

Knowing what the animal is doing while you are away

The camera chain above is this hub’s coverage of remote monitoring. For tracking, GPS trackers without cell service, under the playbooks hub, covers which trackers degrade gracefully and which are dead when the network is.

Seeing your pet in the dark

• Reflective and LED gear for a nighttime evacuation: passive reflective versus active LED gear, plus runtime, waterproofing and sizing.

Where to go next

• Backup power sizing in more depth: best portable power stations for pets
• Aquarium and reptile temperature and oxygenation: aquarium and reptile power outage care
• Evacuating with fish when the outage is tied to a storm: transporting fish during a hurricane evacuation
• Refrigerated medication during an outage: pet medication refrigeration outage guide
• Generator safety and carbon monoxide in full: generator carbon monoxide and pets
• Broader hazard playbooks beyond power loss: pet emergency playbooks

If you take two things from this page: work out which of the four dependencies above (aquarium, reptile heat, refrigerated medication or a well pump) applies to your household, and size backup power to that need before the power goes. Then check which clock you are likely to be on. A household in shutoff country and one on the Gulf coast prepare for the same four dependencies with very different amounts of warning, and the warning decides what you get to do first.

Jackery, EcoFlow, Aquarium Co-Op, Penn-Plax, and Pangea Reptile are trademarks of their respective owners; EmergencyPetPrep is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.