Cooking Indoors Safely When the Power Is Out

There is one fact that has to sit above everything else in this article: burning fuel indoors without proper ventilation and flueing can kill you with carbon monoxide, a gas you cannot see or smell. Every option below is ranked by how safely it can be used indoors, and some of the things people search for — camping stoves, barbecues, charcoal — are included here specifically to tell you not to use them inside.

Most kitchen cooking depends on mains electricity or, in some homes, mains gas that still needs an electric ignition or extraction fan. When power fails, your options are: food that needs no cooking at all, a cooking method genuinely designed and rated for indoor use, or accepting that some meals wait until you can cook outside safely. There is no clever hack that makes an outdoor stove, a barbecue, or a charcoal burner safe to run inside a closed room — the carbon monoxide risk doesn't scale down with a cracked window, it just gets slower and still fatal.

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   Start with food that needs no heat. Tinned beans, fish, fruit, bread, peanut butter and pre-cooked pouches keep a household fed for days without any flame at all, and this should be your default plan, not a last resort.

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   Use a genuinely indoor-rated appliance if you have one. A tested indoor gas hob already fitted and vented as part of the building is fine to keep using in a power cut if its ignition is manual or battery-powered; check the model, don't assume.

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   Consider a small, properly certified indoor gas or catalytic heater-stove only if it is explicitly rated for indoor use and you keep a window cracked and a working CO alarm running. Many popular camping stoves are explicitly labelled outdoor-use-only for this exact reason — read the label, not the marketing photo.

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   Never bring a barbecue, charcoal burner, petrol generator or unflued gas heater indoors, into a garage, tent or porch, even briefly. These produce carbon monoxide fast enough to be dangerous within minutes in an enclosed space, and deaths from exactly this mistake happen every year during power cuts and storms.

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   If you must cook with an outdoor-rated stove, do it fully outside or in a genuinely open doorway with cross-ventilation, watching the weather. This isn't a compromise position — it's the actual safe use case for that equipment.

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   Keep a battery or wind-up carbon monoxide alarm as part of your outage kit, separate from mains-powered smoke alarms. A mains alarm that fails when the power does is no alarm at all during the exact scenario you're planning for.

Early symptoms — headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion — are easy to mistake for tiredness or a cold, which is part of what makes CO so dangerous. If more than one person in a room feels unwell at the same time, or symptoms ease when you leave the room and return when you go back in, treat it as a carbon monoxide emergency: get everyone into fresh air immediately and call emergency services.

A basic camping gas stove used strictly outdoors, or a tin can rocket stove built and run entirely in the open, both turn tinned or dried food into a hot meal without touching mains power at all — the key word in both cases is outdoors. For genuinely indoor meals, lean on no-cook food and, if you have one, a properly vented indoor hob.

• US CDC, carbon monoxide poisoning prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/carbon-monoxide/about/index.html)
• NFPA, home fire and CO safety (https://www.nfpa.org/)
• Ready.gov, power outages (https://www.ready.gov/)