How to Check Your LESCO Load-Shedding Schedule in Lahore

Lahore Electric Supply Company, LESCO, publishes its load-shedding and planned shutdown schedule online and lets anyone look it up against their own connection. The lookup is free and needs nothing more than a recent bill.

Checking your schedule, step by step

1. Find your reference number. It is printed on your LESCO bill alongside your account details. Take a photo of it so it is always on your phone.
2. Open the schedule page. Go to lesco.gov.pk/ShutdownSchedule. The page is titled "Load Shedding/Shutdown Schedule" and asks you to enter your reference number.
3. Enter the number exactly as printed, and submit.
4. Read both kinds of entry. The page covers routine load-shedding and planned shutdowns for maintenance, which can be longer and fall at different times.
5. Check again every week. Schedules move with demand, heat and maintenance work. A timetable from last month is a guess.

Why your neighbour's schedule is different

Electricity reaches homes and offices through feeders — distribution lines that each supply a group of connections. Load-shedding is planned feeder by feeder, not street by street or by the name of a neighbourhood. Two houses on the same road can be on different feeders and lose power at completely different times.

That is why a schedule posted in a community group can be accurate for the person who posted it and wrong for you. The only version worth trusting is the one tied to your own reference number.

What the schedule does not tell you

A published schedule covers planned outages. It does not cover faults, trips, damaged cables or sudden demand spikes, which cause unscheduled cuts. Treat the schedule as the minimum you will lose, not the maximum.

Planning work around load-shedding

• Book calls outside your slots. Once you know your feeder's timings, schedule client calls and deadlines away from them.
• Put the router on backup, not just the laptop. A charged laptop is useless when the Wi-Fi router is dead. A small UPS for the router and modem keeps you online through a normal shedding slot.
• Know how long your backup lasts. Test it once on a quiet day rather than discovering the answer mid-call.
• Have a fallback place to work for days when outages run long or the heat makes a powerless room unworkable.

We wrote more on this in what is actually worth buying for remote work, including where backup power money matters.

When checking the schedule is not enough

If your work depends on being reachable at fixed hours — overseas clients, standing meetings, live support — no timetable fully protects you, because unscheduled cuts still happen. That is the situation in which a workspace with its own UPS and generator backup earns its cost: the power problem stops being yours to manage.

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