Which radio actually works in a UK power cut?

Long wave is gone, so start there

If your emergency plan involves an old long wave radio, it stopped working for that job this summer. The BBC closed Radio 4 on 198 kHz long wave in the early hours of 27 June 2026, and the transmitters at Droitwich, Westerglen and Burghead were shut down with it. The reason was mundane: nobody makes the valves for the Droitwich transmitter any more.

Long wave mattered for emergencies because it carried hundreds of miles from a single site, which is why it was the traditional fallback. That is over. Anything you buy now needs to work on FM, and preferably DAB as well.

FM is the one that matters

FM carries the BBC's national stations and, more importantly in a local emergency, BBC local radio, which is the station that carries practical local information when something goes wrong in your area.

DAB works too and sounds better, but it uses more battery for the same listening time, and a cheap set will flatten its cells faster. A radio that does FM only is perfectly good for this job. FM plus DAB is nicer, not essential.

GOV.UK Prepare asks for a battery or wind-up radio in a household kit for exactly this reason: it keeps working when the power, the broadband and the mobile network do not.

The American weather band trap

Many wind-up radios sold here are American designs, and their listings advertise NOAA weather channels as a headline feature. NOAA is the US weather service. Those channels broadcast on frequencies used in North America, and in the UK they receive nothing at all.

It is not a fault, and it does not make the radio bad, but it is not a reason to pay more. Judge a radio on FM reception, how it takes power, and whether the crank feels like it will survive being used in the dark.

How these radios actually take power

Winding is a backup, not a power supply. On a typical hand-crank set a minute of steady cranking buys a few minutes of listening at low volume, which is fine for catching an update and miserable as a way to pass an evening.

The little solar panels are slower still. They trickle-charge over hours of real daylight, which is useful if a cut lasts days and useless on the first evening.

So the honest answer is batteries. A radio that also takes ordinary AA cells lets you keep a packet in the drawer: alkalines hold their charge for years, while a radio's internal cell quietly goes flat between emergencies. Wind the handle when the batteries run out, not instead of having them.

Your phone is not a substitute

Emergency Alerts reach mobile phones and are genuinely useful, but a phone needs charge and a working mast, and both are in short supply during a long or wide power cut. A radio needs neither.

The sensible setup is both: alerts on the phone for the warning, a radio for the hours afterwards, and a power bank so the phone survives to make calls.