An Irish man has shared a hack for making a cup of tea if an electricity blackout were to happen.
It also doubles up as a money-saving solution, as it would cut the cost of boiling a kettle from your electricity bill.
TikTok user Barney Stories uploaded a video of him doing the hack, which involves holding a candle below a tap to heat water as it slowly drips into a mug containing a teabag below.
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Speaking over the clip, he says: “I’m practising for the electricity blackouts and what I’m doing is I’m making a cup of tea by heating the kitchen tap.
“Obviously if there was electricity blackouts you'd have no kettle, so get a candle, now the candle helps you see in the dark but it will also heat the tap and you'll end up with a lovely warm cup of tea.
“Now it takes a little bit of time to do this but you'll end up with a lovely warmish cup of tea at the end of it.”
The clip has been viewed almost 100,000 times with thousands of people ‘liking’ it, and hundreds more commenting.
“I’m intrigued, like is this possible?” one person asked.
Another TikTok user joked: “The blackout will be over by the time you're done.”
Someone else said: “No way that works, you need it to be way longer and more candles.”
Other comments included “good thinking”, “brilliant, simply brilliant” and “like a scene out of Father Ted.”
Fears Ireland could be facing blackouts this winter have been building for some time now after the country's electricity grid issued a number of "system alerts".
These alerts mean that the margins between electricity supply and demand are becoming tighter.
The Government has been holding joint gas and electricity emergency training exercises to get ready for any potential winter blackouts.
The first emergency drill happened last Friday and with another scheduled for this Friday – as repeated concerns have been raised about the possibility of chronic supply shortages.
Environment Minister Eamon Ryan’s department said the purpose of the exercise is to test a co-ordinated response to any major incidents across the electricity and gas networks.
Officials say the exercises also reflect “a broadening of the scenarios under consideration”.
These emergency exercises to stress test the impact of any grid shortages involve key stakeholders in the energy sector.
Earlier this month, Dr Muireann Lynch, senior research officer at ESRI said: “Supply on the system is the tightest it’s been for a good while. While the expectation is always that there will be no blackouts, historically we have operated the system far more reliably than targets suggest. A lot of it comes down to the wind and to whether customers can shift their demand from the peak times. If there are interruptions, they’ll almost certainly occur at peak times.”
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