PG&E Power Outage Guide: What to Do Before, During, and After

The first 10 minutes

Power drops. Before anything else, answer one question: is it just my house?

1. Check the breaker panel. A tripped main looks exactly like an outage. If the main is on and half your house has power, you may have lost one leg of your service — that’s a PG&E call, not an electrician call, and it can cook 240V appliances. Turn off your AC and dryer until it’s fixed.
2. Look outside. Neighbors dark? Street lights out? Then it’s the grid.
3. Pull up PG&E’s outage map at pge.com/outages. Click your outage dot: it shows the cause, how many customers are affected, whether a crew is assigned, and the estimated restoration time. The first estimate is a placeholder more often than a promise — it firms up once a crew is on site.
4. Report it at 1-800-743-5002 or in your PG&E account. Reporting matters: outage extents are partly built from who calls in. If your street is out but the map shows nothing, you might be the first report.
5. Keep the fridge and freezer closed. The clock starts now — details below.
6. Unplug the sensitive stuff. TVs, computers, garage-door boards, well-pump controllers. When power comes back it often comes back dirty, and the restoration surge is what takes electronics out. Leave one lamp on so you know the moment it’s back.

The food-safety clock (the numbers people actually need)

Straight from USDA guidance, and worth writing on the inside of a cabinet door:

Every door-open resets nothing and costs you cold. Decide what you want before you open it, grab it, close it. Perishables that have been above 40°F for more than 2 hours — meat, dairy, leftovers, cut produce — go in the trash. A digital fridge thermometer costs about $10 and turns this from guesswork into a reading. And the classic move still works: freeze a cup of water, set a coin on top. If you come home from a weekend away and the coin is at the bottom, the freezer thawed and refroze while you were gone.

Generators: the one rule that isn’t negotiable

Run it outside, at least 20 feet from windows and doors, exhaust pointed away from the house. Carbon monoxide from a generator in a garage — even with the door open — kills people in California every fire season. If you own a generator, own a battery-powered CO alarm too.

The second rule protects the people fixing your outage: power flows into the house through a transfer switch or an interlock, never through a “backfeed” cord into a wall or dryer outlet. Backfeeding energizes the lines outside your house and can electrocute the line crew working to restore your street. An electrician installs an interlock kit for a few hundred dollars; it’s the difference between a legal setup and a lethal one.

If someone in your home depends on power

CPAP, oxygen concentrator, refrigerated medication, an electric wheelchair — if that’s your household, enroll in PG&E’s Medical Baseline program. Two things come with it: extra energy allocation at the lowest baseline rate, and — the part that matters in outage country — extra notification before a PSPS shutoff, including additional calls, texts, and in some cases someone physically knocking on your door if you haven’t confirmed you saw the notice. A medical practitioner signs off on the application at pge.com. If you qualify, this is the single highest-value outage preparation available, and it costs nothing.

PSPS: the outage they schedule on purpose

A Public Safety Power Shutoff is PG&E de-energizing lines ahead of dangerous fire weather — high winds, low humidity, dry fuel — so a downed line can’t start a fire. If you live in the El Dorado County foothills, PSPS is part of the deal now. What to know:

• Notice comes in waves — PG&E aims for roughly 48 hours and 24 hours ahead, then again when the shutoff starts. The alerts go to whatever contact info is on your PG&E account. Log in once and make sure your cell number is current; that’s a two-minute fix that buys you two days of warning.
• Address-level alerts without an account: PG&E offers PSPS ZIP-code alerts for renters and anyone else at pge.com.
• Restoration takes longer than the weather. After the wind dies down, crews physically inspect every de-energized line mile before re-energizing. Plan for the tail, not just the event.
• Community Resource Centers open during larger events — power for devices and medical equipment, water, Wi-Fi, AC. Locations are posted with each event.

When the power comes back

• Give the grid a few minutes before you restart the big loads — AC, EV charger, well pump. Everything on your street reconnecting at once is what causes the second outage.
• Check the fridge thermometer (or the coin) before you trust the food.
• Reset GFCI outlets if the garage fridge or freezer is on one — they trip on restoration surges, quietly, and you find out a week later.

Does PG&E pay you back for an outage?

Sometimes, and it’s worth knowing the two doors:

• Safety Net program: PG&E has historically paid residential customers $25–$100 automatically when a severe-storm outage runs 48 hours or longer. Automatic means no application — but verify the current terms at pge.com, because program details change.
• Claims: if you believe PG&E equipment or negligence caused a loss — spoiled food, damaged appliances — you can file at pge.com/claims. Keep receipts and photos; claims are evaluated case by case. Planned PSPS shutoffs generally aren’t compensated.

Solar and outages: what actually happens

Here’s the question I get after every outage: “If I had solar, would my lights have stayed on?” The short answer: panels alone, no. Grid-tied solar shuts itself off during an outage — a safety feature called anti-islanding that keeps your system from energizing the lines while crews work on them. Plenty of solar homeowners learn this during their first outage, standing in a dark kitchen under a roof full of panels.

A battery changes the answer. A properly sized battery carries your fridge, internet, lights, and phones for a day or more, and the panels recharge it every morning for as long as the grid stays down. Under NEM 3.0 the battery also improves the everyday economics — it shifts your solar to the expensive evening hours — so outage backup and bill math now point at the same hardware. If you want the sizing numbers, I wrote them up here: Solar Batteries in California: NEM 3.0 Sizing, Cost & Payback.

The bottom line

Outages here come in two flavors — the surprise kind and the scheduled kind — and both are manageable with a short checklist and realistic expectations. The grid in the foothills is going to keep doing this. The question worth sitting with afterward is the same one that’s worth asking about your bill: what am I actually getting for what I pay, and what are my options?

That second question is the one I answer for a living. You send me your actual PG&E bill, I read your real usage, your rate plan, and your roof, and I tell you plainly where you stand — solar, a battery, both, or staying right where you are. About 1 in 3 audits end with me telling the homeowner to stay with PG&E. That’s a real answer, and it’s free.