When the power goes out in a Queensland hospitality venue you have roughly four hours of usable cold room time if the door stays shut, and about two hours in a fridge. That clock decides whether you lose a weekend of trade or a weekend of stock as well.
The first ten minutes
- Close every fridge and cool room door and tape a note on them. Every opening costs you an hour.
- Log the time the power went off. Insurers and food safety records both need it.
- Check the Energex or Ergon outage map for a restoration estimate before you make any call about service.
- Decide whether to trade limited or close. One named person makes that call, not a committee.
- Tell the queue and today's bookings something honest within fifteen minutes.
Taking money without EFTPOS
Most terminals fail with the internet rather than the power, but the effect is the same. Keep a charged mobile with a 4G hotspot and either a battery-powered terminal or a phone-based tap-to-pay app as a fallback. Keep a float and a written record book for cash trade. Test the fallback on a quiet Tuesday before you ever need it.
The food safety part people get wrong
Potentially hazardous food held above 5 degrees for more than four hours has to be discarded. You need a temperature log at the point the power returns, not a guess a week later, because your insurer will ask and so will council. Keep a probe thermometer somewhere it won't disappear.
After the power returns
Photograph everything before you throw it out. Record temperatures and times. Check every compressor restarted, because a cool room that fails overnight costs more than the outage did. Then note what didn't work and fix that one thing before next storm season.
Worked example: a Brisbane bayside pub's 90-minute outage
A pub in Wynnum lost power for 90 minutes on a Saturday lunch service after a transformer fault. The duty manager followed a laminated playbook: cool room doors taped shut immediately, a battery terminal brought out from behind the bar within four minutes for card payments, and a short honest announcement to the dining room that food service would run a reduced menu for the next hour. Total lost trade was estimated at under $400 in refused walk-ins. A similar venue two suburbs over with no plan lost an estimated $2,800 in refunded bookings and wasted stock during a comparable outage the same month, mostly because staff spent the first 20 minutes deciding what to tell customers rather than acting.
Common mistakes that cost money
- Opening the cool room repeatedly to check on stock, which burns through the safe holding window far faster than leaving it shut.
- Not knowing the four-hour and two-hour rule and guessing at what is still safe to serve once power returns.
- Having no cash or battery-terminal fallback and simply closing when EFTPOS goes down, even for outages likely to be brief.
- Waiting to tell waiting customers anything, which turns a manageable delay into a wave of cancellations and bad reviews.
- Never testing the fallback terminal, discovering on the day that its battery is flat or its SIM has expired.
What good looks like
A well-run venue has a laminated playbook near the point of sale, a tested battery terminal charged and ready, a probe thermometer nobody has walked off with, and a duty manager who has been through the decision once in a drill rather than for the first time during a real outage.
How long can I keep food in the fridge during a power outage?
As a general food safety guide, a full freezer will hold a safe temperature for around 48 hours and a half-full freezer for around 24 hours if the door stays shut. A refrigerator will typically keep food safely cold for about four hours. Once potentially hazardous food has been above 5 degrees for more than four hours it should be discarded rather than risked.
Do I have to report a power outage related food loss to council?
Local councils do not typically require a report for routine stock loss, but you should keep your own temperature and time records in case of a food safety audit or an insurance claim, since both may ask for evidence of when the outage occurred and what action you took.
For a real example of how five minutes of planning played out, read the cool room died on a Friday night, and see our cyclone season checklist for the longer outages that follow severe weather.
Build this into a playbook your duty manager can follow without calling you. That is exactly what the app is for.
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