Power Outage With Pets: Which Animal Needs You First

A goldfish in a stopped tank is in trouble before a bearded dragon in a cooling one, and a cockatiel in a cold room is in no trouble at all until somebody lights a camp stove next to it. The power going out does not threaten every animal in the house the same way or on the same clock. Fish lose oxygen in hours. Reptiles lose heat over hours to a day. Rabbits and guinea pigs cope with the cold and are endangered by a summer outage instead. Birds, dogs and cats are the easy ones, right up until the moment someone tries to fix the cold with fire.

The job is to work the house in the right order, and to resist the instinct that kills more pets in an outage than the weather does.

The Order of Operations

The first minute is the same in every house. Note the time, because the tank and the reptile enclosure are both on clocks you will need to judge later. Stop every feeder. Put the lid on the aquarium and a blanket over it and over the reptile enclosure. Then work the table.

Most pet arthropods ride out an outage without noticing, and the exceptions, the hermit crab tank among them, are in the invertebrate plan. The animals that need you are the ones living in water and the ones living under a heat lamp.

Fish: The Clock Is Oxygen

An aquarium has three things keeping its residents alive, and the power runs all of them: the pump that moves water and gets oxygen into it, the filter where bacteria turn ammonia into something less toxic, and the heater. They fail in that order of urgency, and if the tank has to be emptied, bagging and moving the fish is its own procedure with its own mistakes.

Dissolved oxygen above 5 mg/L, the same number a test kit reads as 5 ppm, is where most fish are comfortable. Below 5 mg/L they are stressed, and at 4 mg/L or lower they begin to die, large fish first, depending on species and how long it lasts. A stopped tank falls through those numbers at a rate set by how many fish are in it, how warm it is, since warm water holds less oxygen than cool, and how much surface the water has to exchange gas across. The sign is piping: fish schooling at the surface, gulping air. Fish kills from low oxygen are usually found early in the morning, after a night with no light and no photosynthesis to add any.

Stop feeding and switch off any automatic feeder at once. If there is a battery air pump in the house, it goes on now, through an air stone or sponge filter, and the schedule is how to ration a single charge once it matters: an hour of air every eight hours, every four in a heavily stocked tank or one where fish are already at the surface. A USB air pump runs off a laptop or a phone power bank. A purpose-built battery backup pump runs about 20 hours continuously, or 40 hours or more on a mode that pulses 15 seconds on and 15 off. Without a pump, a cup of tank water poured back from a few inches up for a minute or two, every 10 to 15 minutes in a small tank and every 20 to 30 in a large one, is the hand version. A battery air pump cannot be improvised, so it is bought before it is needed and lives in the kit. An axolotl needs the same attention to oxygen and none to heat, since cold water is what it wants.

A stopped hang-on-back or canister filter is a sealed box of waste and dying bacteria. Either pull the media into the tank, where the water holds more oxygen, or unplug the filter at the wall. A filter left plugged in restarts by itself when the power comes back and pushes everything that rotted inside it straight into the tank. The reason feeding stops at the start is the filter: un-ionized ammonia above 0.05 mg/L damages gills, 2 mg/L is lethal for many fish, nitrite above 0.1 mg/L is toxic, and every flake that goes in is ammonia nothing is processing.

Water holds heat far better than air. A tight lid and several layers of blankets, towels or a foil emergency blanket hold most of it, and chemical heat packs taped by their ends to the outside glass, one per 20 to 30 gallons, add more without touching the water. A tank that has dropped a long way gets a warm water change mixed in a bucket, never boiling water poured in, and the climb back is slow: a sudden swing of even a few degrees weakens a fish's immune system, and the rule for any change is no more than 1°F an hour. A summer outage flips it: out of the sun, blankets off, a battery fan across the surface, and no frozen bottles in a fish tank, which produce exactly the swing fish cannot handle. The axolotl is the exception in a heat wave, and its cold-water guide covers that.

When power returns, no food for 24 hours, test ammonia and nitrite, and change at least half the water if ammonia is up. The filter gets cleaned before it is plugged in, with the media rinsed in tank water and never scrubbed, because what survives on it is the colony that has to rebuild.

Reptiles and Amphibians: Heat, Then Patience

A reptile enclosure loses heat the moment the lamp goes dark, and the temperature floor for each species sits in one table in the reptile emergency plan: a bearded dragon's is 65°F, with 60°F tolerated for no more than a day or two, and a ball python's is 72 to 75°F. The first hour is insulation and relocation, a blanket over the enclosure and the warmest interior room, with a hand warmer or wrapped hot water bottle beside the animal and never against it. The inversion from the mammals is feeding: it stops, because a cold gut cannot digest prey, and water stays. Past a day or two below the floor, the animal goes to a vet, a friend with power or a reptile shop. A snake or a tortoise that goes slow and quiet in a cool house is not brumating on its own terms, since brumation is a managed, gradual cool-down with an empty gut, and an outage is neither.

Small Mammals: Summer Is the Emergency

The rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas and hamsters are the group most people worry about in a winter outage and the group it threatens least. Their danger line runs the other way: 75°F for a guinea pig and about 80°F for the rest is the ceiling, and a cool room is a far smaller problem than a hot one. In the first hour, keep feeding them. A rabbit or guinea pig is a hindgut fermenter whose gut has to keep moving, and an animal that stops eating is in more immediate trouble than one that is a few degrees cold. Stress starts GI stasis, and an outage is stress. In a summer outage, frozen water bottles wrapped in a towel to lie against, wet towels, shade, water in more than one container, the coolest room in the house, and a battery fan. In a winter outage, no drafts, the enclosure off the floor, deep hay to burrow in, and a check that the water bottle nozzle has not frozen. The one hard floor in the group belongs to the hamster: below 41°F a Syrian hamster can slip into torpor and starve in it. And the decision to relocate, to a friend's basement or a vet with power, is made at hour two of a summer outage, because a house without air conditioning is still climbing all afternoon.

Birds: The Danger Is What You Burn

A healthy bird in a cool room is not the emergency. Cover most of the cage with a towel or blanket, leaving a gap for air, move it to the warmest interior room, keep the food topped up because a bird burns through it fast, and for a small or visibly cold bird, short spells under a loose shirt against your own body add heat with no equipment at all. A wrapped hot water bottle near the cage, never against it, helps in a cold house.

What endangers a bird is the fix people reach for. A bird's respiratory system pulls more of whatever is in the air through its body per breath than a person's does, and it has no buffer against carbon monoxide. Which brings the whole house to the one rule that matters more than any thermometer.

The House: Nothing Burns Indoors

The CDC's carbon monoxide rules for an outage are short and absolute. Never use a generator inside a home or garage, even with the doors and windows open. Outside, it runs more than 20 feet from any window, door or vent. Never heat a house with a gas oven. Never burn charcoal indoors. Never use a portable gas camp stove indoors. Do not use portable flameless chemical heaters indoors. Nothing burns on a stove or in a fireplace that is not vented. Battery-operated carbon monoxide detectors, or ones with battery backup, go near every sleeping area, and they are the only warning anyone in the house will get, because the gas has no smell and no color. The symptoms in a person are headache, dizziness, weakness, an upset stomach, vomiting, chest pain and confusion, often mistaken for flu, and an animal cannot report any of them.

Candles are the other instinct. A battery lantern does the same job with no flame near a cage, a curtain or a blanket-wrapped tank, and no combustion in a room an animal cannot leave.

Dogs and Cats: The Easy Ones

A dog or cat in a house that has lost its heat is in the same situation as the people in it, and the ASPCA's winter rule covers both: if it is too cold for you, it is probably too cold for your pet. They share the room you are in, with a blanket and a bed off the floor, and a short-haired dog gets a sweater. They never wait in a car, which holds cold the way it holds heat and can freeze an animal to death. They eat a little more in the cold, because staying warm burns energy, and they need water that has not frozen. In a summer outage the problem is heat, and the answers are shade, water, a cool floor and the coolest room, with the car ruled out for the same reason. A dog that goes out on snow or ice goes on a leash, because a dog can lose its own scent trail in it and more dogs are lost in winter than in any other season.

When to Leave

Managing in place works while the house is still inside the safe band for every animal in it. When it is not, and the outage has no end in sight, the plan is a friend with power, a relative's basement, an exotics vet or a boarder, and the call is made early. Ready.gov's rule for a disaster is that if officials tell you to evacuate, the pets evacuate too, and the catch is that many public shelters and hotels do not take them, so the place that will is worked out before the day. A buddy system with a neighbor who can get the animals out if you are not home covers the hour you are at work.

The kit, built before the lights go out, is two kits: a bigger one for staying put and a lighter one for leaving. Both hold several days of food in a sealed container and water to match, the animal's medication, and copies of its records on paper and on a phone. Both hold a carrier or tub for each animal, litter and bags for the ones that need them, and a photo of you with the animal to prove it is yours. Both assume a collar and tag with a current number, a microchip registry that has been checked, an out-of-area contact, and something familiar to take the edge off the move. For this house, add the outage-specific pieces: the battery air pump and spare batteries, hand warmers or a hot water bottle, two thick towels, a battery thermometer, a battery lantern, a carbon monoxide detector that does not need the mains, and the vet, the 24-hour exotics clinic and the poison lines written on the inside of the kit lid.

The outage that goes wrong is rarely the one where the house got cold. It is the one where the fish tank was left to its own devices until morning, or the one where a generator ran in the garage to keep the reptile lamp on, and the bird in the next room stopped singing first.

Sources & Further Reading