Imagine a whole day where we transform your house into your dream experience. You tell us what your Ultimate Free Power Day looks like, and if you end up winning, we’ll bring it to life for 24 hours. It might be a backyard music festival, a luxury spa, or a mid-summer winter wonderland – it’s completely up to you.

The Ultimate Free Power Day competition runs from 12:01am on 1 February 2026 to 11:59pm on 31 March 2026. You can submit your ideas anytime during this period.

Anyone aged 18 or over and living in New Zealand can enter. Kids can help brainstorm all the buzzy ideas, but whoever submits must be over 18.

Not in the slightest. The competition is open to everyone, and their dog (actually, legal said no dogs, sorry Fluffy!)

You can only enter once per person, so make sure you put your best entry forward.

If you win, whatever you think up will take place in your home. For logistical reasons, you’ll need to live in a standalone home (not an apartment). And you’ll either need to own the home, or have permission from the property owner.

Yes. If you made a mistake or need to make changes like adding lasers to the shark tank, you can resubmit your entry. We’ll use the latest version you send as your entry.

Absolutely. It’s costs nada, zeroni, zilch – there’s no payment or purchase required.

We’ll send you an email confirming your submission.

Yes, once we’ve locked in the ‘who’ and ‘where’, we’ll work closely with the winner to choose a date and finalise all the nuts and bolts.

A panel of Mercury staff and production partners will review all the entries, and select a winner based on creativity, ambition and feasibility.

With all the unknowns of how the winning Ultimate Free Power Day will come to life, we’ll have a shortlist phase once the competition closes. Those lucky few may need to give us a bit more info (like photos or a video of their home and the family). Entrants might also be interviewed by our production partners before we find our final winner.

The selected winner will be contacted by email or phone on Monday 27th April and announced on Monday 4th May.

We collect your details to run the promotion and, if you choose to opt in, to send you marketing updates or promotional material.

You can request access to, or correction, of your information at any time by emailing privacy@mercury.co.nz. Our full privacy policy is available at mercury.co.nz/privacy.

Yes. The AI assistant is designed to be a creative, supportive tool with strong safety guardrails. It won’t produce harmful or inappropriate content, and everything you enter is processed securely. Your data won’t be stored by OpenAI or used for training AI models.