Load shedding changes the safety profile of a home or neighbourhood in ways that are easy to underestimate. Streetlights go dark, electric fences and alarm backup batteries drain faster than people expect, security cameras drop offline, and the predictable schedule itself gives opportunistic criminals a window they can plan around. None of this means panic is warranted — it means a few specific precautions matter more during scheduled outages than they do the rest of the time.
Before the lights go out
- Know your stage schedule in advance and treat the hour before an outage as prep time, not the hour it starts.
- Check your alarm system's backup battery periodically — most degrade over a few years and won't last through a long outage even though they did when new.
- Charge power banks and phones ahead of predictable outages, especially if your home WiFi router and any app-based alerts depend on power and connectivity.
- Keep a torch or headlamp somewhere fixed and known — not wherever it happened to be left last time.
During the outage
- Avoid advertising that you're home alone via loudly lit single rooms or obvious movement near windows once it's dark outside and the street isn't.
- Keep entry points as secure as they'd be with power on — a dead alarm doesn't mean deadbolts and gates stop working. Check them explicitly rather than assuming they're fine.
- Be more cautious than usual about opening the door for unexpected visitors; outages are sometimes used as a pretext by people posing as technicians or officials.
- If you're out walking or driving, prioritise routes with functioning streetlights or backup lighting over the shortest route, particularly after dark.
What to have ready, always
A South African household that regularly experiences load shedding benefits from treating a small emergency kit as standard, not optional: a charged power bank kept exclusively for emergencies, a torch with working batteries, and a way to reach help that doesn't depend on the home WiFi network — a charged phone with mobile data, at minimum.
Why this matters more than it seems to
Individually, a dark street or a drained alarm battery is a minor inconvenience. Together, and on a predictable schedule that anyone can look up, they change the calculation for someone looking for an easy target. Treating outage hours with slightly more situational awareness — not fear, just attention — closes most of that gap.