The City of Cape Town says the ongoing prepaid electricity meter upgrades no longer apply to its customers, as all meters have already been updated.
Prepaid electricity customers nationwide have until 24 November 2024 to update the software on their meters.
CITY OF CAPE TOWN RESIDENTS NOT AFFECTED BY PREPAID ELECTRICITY METER UPGRADES
The metro municipality said its customers are concerned that they will not be able to recharge their prepaid meters by the end of November 2024 and will not have a power supply. However, all the approximately 570 000 City prepaid meters have been done.
“This software update programme is therefore coming to a close as far as City customers are concerned,” the municipality said.
To clarify, the City of Cape Town said there were/are two meter-related programmes:
- The national software meter updates where when making a purchase, customers received long codes to update their own meter software to the Key Revision Number (KRN) 2.
- The second meter-related programme is the City of Cape Town prepaid meter replacement programme – This programme is still underway and replaces old single and three-phase electricity credit meters and prepaid meters with new prepaid meters in City-supplied suburbs to ensure more accurate readings, greater usage control and cost management.
WHY SHOULD METERS BE UPDATED?
Eskom said all prepaid electricity meters based on Standard Transfer Specification (STS) technology will stop accepting new credit tokens because of the expiry of these vending codes. This will mean they will stop dispensing electricity after the existing credit is used up, thus making the meter inactive.
Each credit token has a unique token identifier (TID) encoded in the 20 digits to prevent token replay at the meter. The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024 (known as the TID rollover event), thus causing the prepayment meter to stop accepting new tokens.
If your meter has not been recoded, it will not accept the tokens you have purchased, which means it will stop working. All prepaid meters must be recoded, whether you are an Eskom customer or a municipally supplied customer.
You can read more about this here.
HOW TO UPGRADE YOUR METER
National power supplier Eskom said in order to check whether your electricity meter has been re-coded/upgraded to KRN2 or is still on KRN1, one should enter the code 1844 6744 0738 4377 2416 on the prepaid meter’s keypad.
The screen will display either the number 1 or 2, and in some cases, there may also be alphabetical letters alongside the KRN number.
Eskom said number 1 means your meter is still on KRN1 and needs to be re-coded/upgraded to KRN2.
Number 2 means your meter has been re-coded/upgraded to KRN2. Your credit token slip will also reflect KRN2 when you make electricity purchases.
HAVE YOU ALREADY UPGRADED TO THE NEW METER? WAS IT SEAMLESS?
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