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A power outage is a different hazard than a storm or a fire, and it calls for a different playbook: in most cases, you shelter in place rather than evacuate. But “shelter in place” isn’t the same instruction here as it is for an airborne hazard. Ready.gov’s general shelter guidance says to close vents and turn off the HVAC; a power outage may take the HVAC away from you anyway, and if your pet is heat- or cold-sensitive, the actual job is managing without climate control, not sealing the house against it. This page is the hub for that job: what genuinely depends on grid power for an animal’s welfare, what to do about each dependency, and the generator and carbon monoxide risks that make this hazard more dangerous than it looks.
We don’t sell products or take sponsorships here. Every claim below traces to a named source (FEMA, Ready.gov, the CDC, the CPSC, the ASPCA, AVMA, or a manufacturer’s own spec sheet), and where a claim is thinner than we’d like, we say so instead of rounding it up to sound more authoritative.
Act Now: The Two Risks That Can’t Wait
Two things about a power outage are dangerous enough that they need to be handled before anything else on this page.
Carbon monoxide. Generators, camp stoves, and grills run outdoors only, and the distance is the part people skip. Ready.gov’s power-outage page states it plainly: “Generators and fuel should always be used outdoors and at least 20 feet away from windows, doors and attached garages.” The CPSC adds the direction the exhaust should point, telling owners to use generators “outside only, at least 20 feet away from homes with exhaust facing away.” FEMA’s generator fact sheet publishes no distance figure at all, so we don’t cite one to it; what FEMA does say is that 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 using fans will not prevent carbon monoxide from building up.
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, an average of nearly 100 people die in the U.S. each year from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators. Three things about that number are worth knowing before you repeat it. It is a 2019-2021 annual average, not a body count for any one year. It is a statistical estimate scaled to death-certificate data, published in CPSC’s February 2025 report on non-fire carbon monoxide deaths, and recent years in that series are preliminary and typically get 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 all sit outside it. If you have seen a figure of about 85 for this hazard, that was CPSC’s correct number for an earlier window, 2017-2019, drawn from a different report series that counted reported incidents rather than scaling to national totals. It has since been superseded. The trend has moved up, not down, which is the opposite of the direction people assume when they see an old number quoted confidently.
Pets are vulnerable to the same gas: the ASPCA lists depression, vomiting, weakness, coma, seizures, difficulty breathing, and cardiac arrhythmias as CO poisoning symptoms in animals, and specifically flags birds as especially vulnerable because of their respiratory systems. Ready.gov names the risk to animals directly too, calling carbon monoxide “a colorless, odorless gas that can kill you, your family and pets.”
If you suspect CO exposure in a pet, get them 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 with it and your pet starts excessive panting, drooling, showing unsteadiness or collapse, an abnormal gum color, or unusual anxiousness, that’s 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 meaningfully higher risk. A peer-reviewed evidence review reports that in one of the studies 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 inside that 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 out cool surfaces like tile or a sink are early signs worth acting on, not waiting out.
If either of these applies right now, stop reading and act. Everything below is about preparing so you’re not making these calls for the first time mid-outage.
Shelter in Place or Evacuate? Reading the Situation Correctly
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 the moment the outage is a symptom of something bigger (a wildfire that knocked out lines, a hurricane, a gas leak), in which case you follow whatever evacuation order applies to the underlying hazard, not the outage itself.
Ready.gov’s own instructions can pull in different directions depending on which scenario you’re actually in. Its shelter page carries three steps in a row: “Bring your family and pets inside.” Then: “Lock doors, close windows, air vents and fireplace dampers.” Then: “Turn off fans, air conditioning and forced air heating systems.” That’s sound advice if you’re sealing the house against smoke or an airborne contaminant. A plain power outage is the opposite problem: the AC and forced-air heat are already off because the power’s gone, and a sealed house with no climate control is exactly the setup that raises heatstroke risk for an at-risk pet. Read the actual hazard you’re facing before defaulting to a generic checklist step.
Vet-wins note: 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 specific animal can safely 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 different situations get filed under “power outage”, and they do not share a clock. They differ in how much warning you get and in how long you have to hold, which changes every action underneath them. A household that runs a three-day protocol against a three-week problem has made a serious planning error.
This page runs on the unannounced outage, measured in hours to a few days. Nobody warned you, the power is already off, and restoration is expected inside the window your stored water and your battery gear can cover. Every instruction below assumes that. The other three clocks are named here so you can tell which one you are on, and each of them gets its own guide rather than a paragraph on this one.
The weeks-scale outage is a different planning tier, not a longer version of this one. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. 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. Once restoration is measured in weeks instead of hours, the constraints stop being aquarium pumps and start being 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, and this page does not make that call for you. Our weeks-long outage pet plan makes it.
A scheduled shutoff runs backwards 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, and how much warning you get depends entirely on which utility bills you, with every one of them warning that the alert may not arrive at all: PG&E’s own 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 that trigger a shutoff can also trigger a wildfire evacuation order. Our PSPS pet countdown protocol lays out all four published notification ladders side by side, tells you which one is actually yours, 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. In Texas, ERCOT publishes three escalating levels. It issues an Energy Emergency Alert 1 when operating reserves drop below 2,500 MW and are expected to stay below that level for at least 30 minutes, and asks the public to safely reduce electric use. It issues an EEA 2 when reserves drop below 2,000 MW and are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, or frequency drops below 59.91 Hz for 15 minutes, at which point it is bringing all available generation online and releasing remaining reserves. It issues an EEA 3 when reserves fall below 1,500 MW, or frequency drops below 59.8 Hz for any period, and at that level ERCOT directs transmission operators to reduce load through controlled outages that reach all customer classes including residential. ERCOT runs the Texas grid; other regions publish staged alerts under their own names and thresholds, so look up the operator for your own grid instead of assuming these numbers travel. An alert stage is time you still have. Charging the power station, pre-cooling the room, filling water containers and topping off a battery air pump all belong in that window, not after it closes.
Everything from here down is written for the first clock. If you are on one of the other three, the sequence changes before any of this applies.
What Actually Depends on Power: Four Real Dependencies
Most of what people worry about during an outage doesn’t actually need backup power. Four things genuinely do, and each has a different fix:
| Dependency |
What fails without power |
What it needs |
| Aquarium |
Pump stops oxygenating/circulating water; heater stops maintaining temperature |
Battery-backup air pump (oxygenation); insulation and monitoring (temperature) |
| Reptile enclosure |
Heat source shuts off |
Insulation, hourly 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/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 well-pump knowledgebase; 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 there is behavioral and monitoring-based (moving the pet to the coolest/warmest room, watching for the warning signs above) rather than a single piece of gear, so it’s covered in the heatstroke section above rather than the table.
Aquariums: Oxygen First, Temperature Second
The more time-sensitive problem in most tanks is oxygenation, not temperature. A battery-backup air pump keeps water circulating and oxygenated while the power’s out. Two documented options at different runtime tiers:
- Aquarium Co-Op’s battery-backup air pump auto-switches to its internal lithium-ion battery the moment power drops, running 20 hours in continuous mode or up to 40 hours in power-save mode (15-second on/off cycling), per the manufacturer’s own 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’s the longer runtime of the two, though that specific figure comes from a retailer rather than Penn-Plax’s own site.
Temperature is the second half of the problem, and it’s less urgent in most households: rooms don’t lose heat as fast as a tank loses oxygen circulation. Tropical species are more heat-sensitive to a temperature drop than hardier species. If you keep a heated tropical tank through a multi-day outage, that’s a case for the portable-power-station route below rather than a battery air pump alone, since a heater draws far more power than an air pump does.
Reptiles: Insulate First, Add Heat Carefully
A board-certified avian and exotics veterinarian’s own outage guidance sets the tolerance window: reptiles can safely tolerate brumation-level cold “for a few days” in the short term, per Dr. Laurie Hess, DVM of the Veterinary Center for Birds and Exotics, though she’s clear that prolonged cold still carries real illness risk. This isn’t an immediate crisis the way a fish tank losing oxygen can be. Tropical species are more heat-sensitive than desert species. The steps that matter:
- Insulate the enclosure with blankets or towels to slow heat loss. This one is physics rather than a published protocol. None of the sources below publishes a reptile-enclosure insulation rule, so we’re not going to attach a name to it that doesn’t belong there.
- Check the temperature with a thermometer rather than guessing by feel. PetMD’s veterinary write-up on reptile hypothermia (Sean Perry, DVM) says temperature guns read both habitat and body-surface temperatures reliably, and recommends keeping a log of the habitat temperatures you’re providing. No source we found publishes a check-every-hour rule, so pick a cadence you’ll actually hold to and write the readings down.
- Watch for cold-stress signs. PetMD lists lethargy, decreased activity, decreased appetite, and an increased amount of sleeping among the signs of hypothermia in reptiles, and is explicit that 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 genuinely needed, use a purpose-built reptile heat pack, not an open flame and not a generic human hand warmer.
Where we depart from Petco, and why. Petco calls chemical hand warmers “an excellent and inexpensive way to provide quick heat for your reptile.” We don’t, and you should know we’re disagreeing with the source we just cited rather than extending it. Two mechanisms drive that, and one of them has to be stated more carefully than we first stated it. The first is design intent, not a clean temperature gap. Pangea Reptile publishes about 110°F at the surface for its 40-hour pack and HotHands publishes an average of 135°F and a maximum of 158°F, but UniHeat’s own published temperature chart for its 40-hour shipping warmer peaks just under its 150°F gridline, which sits in HotHands’ range rather than below it. What actually separates the products is what each is sold to do: one is sold to hold a temperature around a shipped animal for days, the other is sold to deliver a short burst of heat into a glove. Design for the highest published figure, not the lowest. Our heat pack runtime page carries every published figure and the disagreements between them. The second mechanism is air. HotHands states its warmers make heat “through oxidation when exposed to air”, and Pangea says the red-striped face of its own pack “must always be exposed to air”, which makes a sealed or tightly wrapped enclosure the wrong place for either one. The prohibition doesn’t loosen in an open enclosure; the burn risk is what’s left when the oxygen concern goes away.
Whichever type you use, it should never rest against the animal or directly against the enclosure glass. Glass conducts a hot spot straight through to whatever is lying on the other side, and HotHands’ own published temperatures, an average of 135°F and a maximum of 158°F, run well above anything reptile skin should touch directly. Buffer it with a towel or insulation.
The same hand-warmer caution applies even harder to a newborn litter, which cannot move away from a hot spot the way an adult animal can. If your household has a nursing mother and neonates riding out the outage, our evacuating a pregnant or nursing pet guide covers the ambient-temperature targets with and without the dam present, and why the mother herself 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), the safe move when the power goes out is to call your veterinarian or the medication’s manufacturer, not to apply a general timeline. Temperature tolerance varies by drug and formulation, and no single pet-specific authority publishes one universal number for how long a given medication stays safe once refrigeration stops.
What is documented, as a general proxy rather than a medication-specific rule: a refrigerator holds safe temperature for about 4 hours with the door closed, per the CDC’s food-safety guidance, and a full freezer holds 48 hours (24 hours if half-full). Keep the door closed as much as possible to preserve that window, and use the call to your vet or the manufacturer to find out what it actually means for your pet’s specific prescription. This page isn’t the place to give you a number to act on instead of that call.
The pet food chilling in the same refrigerator is a separate question again, and those elapsed-time figures are not the way to settle it either. Our guide to 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’re about to feed an animal, and why frozen raw is the case where the decision isn’t only about the animal.
Well Water: The Fix Is Storage, Not Improvisation
An electric well pump stops the instant the power does. A pressure tank holds a small residual volume, and the published sources disagree about whether you may draw it. PrivateWellClass.org states: “If you have a pressure tank, you can use the water in it. Your tank should be equipped with a faucet near the bottom, where you can access the water.” Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy points the other way for longer events: “During extended power outages it is important to refrain from opening faucets, taking showers, or flushing toilets. While your water system may have several gallons of water in storage, withdrawing water while the power is out depressurizes the system and increases the risk of contamination.” The same fact sheet warns how that failure presents: “The water can become contaminated without any noticeable change in taste, odor, or clarity.” You cannot check it by looking at the bowl.
Michigan escalates from advice to a testing step once the system runs dry: “If your water system was depressurized during interruption of electrical power or if flooding of the well has occurred, the water should not be consumed until testing has verified that it is potable (fit to drink).” It sets the clearance standard at two consecutive samples, collected 8 hours apart, showing no coliform bacteria, which means a household that empties its tank on the first night of an outage is not back to normal when the power returns. Neither of these documents is written about an animal, so applying either one to a pet’s bowl is this site’s own extension of guidance written for people.
So this isn’t a source to lean on mid-outage. The fix is stored water ahead of time: keep enough drinking water on hand for every person and pet in the household, refreshed on a regular schedule, so you’re not depending on a pump that just lost power. If your household relies on a well long-term, PrivateWellClass.org recommends a backup power source such as a generator or solar panels connected to the pump, and our electric well pump and pet water guide publishes what such a pump actually draws, why voltage rather than wattage is usually the binding constraint, and the full disagreement between the two sources above.
Backup Power, Sized to the Actual Job
Backup power isn’t one purchase. It’s matching the tool to the dependency. A CO alarm and a phone charger need almost nothing. An aquarium heater or a mini fridge needs real wattage. Sizing it wrong means either paying for capacity you don’t need or running out of power exactly when it matters.
This section covers three options at a glance. For the full comparison and our best-overall pick across five stations, including the EcoFlow RIVER 2 Pro, see our dedicated portable power stations for pets guide.
Dogs and cats have their own low-draw and higher-draw examples 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, while a small space heater (900-1500W) drains the same battery in about two hours or less, and a summer box fan (roughly 67W) runs 10+ hours on a mid-size station. See the worked math for all three in the portable power stations for pets guide. If you don’t have a power station at all, a battery-powered crate fan (a pick on our pet heat wave safety guide) runs a crate’s airflow off D-cell batteries instead, though it moves air without cooling it below the room’s 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 tables below.
None of these replace a generator for whole-home or extended multi-day power needs. They’re sized for keeping specific animal-dependent devices running. If your actual need is whole-home backup, that’s a licensed-electrician conversation about a transfer switch and a properly sized generator, not a portable power station.
The sizing rule doesn’t change with the gear. Match the tool to the dependency, not to the largest capacity you can justify, and know which load you’d shed first if the battery ran low while you were out of the house. For the consumables side of the same question, the pet emergency supply calculator takes species, weight and headcount and returns water, food and litter quantities; the rest of the interactive set is on the tools index.
A generator, if you use one, 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 doesn’t relax because the outage is long or the weather is bad.