ESKOM has stated that the power system is severely constrained again today, 27 January, and the Municipality has been advised by Eskom to implement Stage 1 load shedding as 11am.
Load shedding will continue until 10pm.
All affected Blocks are scheduled for a two hour outage with an additional half hour contingency to cater for switching on. Customers are only scheduled to go off once a day under Stages 1 and 2 and twice daily should a Stage 3 emergency be declared.
The load-shedding schedule is a guideline to determine which Block a customer is in and should be accurate under normal operating conditions.
However, each customer can be fed from multiple substations, some of which could be in different Blocks. Under fault or high load conditions, customers can be fed from alternative neighbouring substations, some of which may be in other Blocks.
The municipality said every effort would be made to follow the schedule but it must be recognised that we may incur technical difficulties in restoring the load and should a customer remain off for a substantial amount of time after the Block has been scheduled to be restored, then that incident must be treated as a fault and reported accordingly.
The municipality continues to urge residents and businesses to implement electricity saving measures at all times to help reduce constraints on the power system and is calling on all customers to urgently switch off geysers, air conditioners, pool pumps and all non-essential appliances throughout the day to reduce electricity demand.
Commercial customers, particularly shopping centres and office blocks, can make the biggest difference by switching off non-essential lights and not to leave office equipment such as photocopiers and computers in standby mode after hours.
In the event of rotational load shedding, switch off all appliances to prevent overload tripping when the power does return.
The Municipality will provide regular updates on the status of the power system through all the media platforms.
If you are experiencing a power outage, either outside your schedule time or when Load Shedding is not active, then it is a result of a fault on the network and not because of load shedding. Report your outage to the Electricity Call centre on 080 13 13 1111.
The load shedding schedule is available on the Municipal website:
https://www.durban.gov.za/City_Services/electricity/Load_Shedding/Pages/default.aspx
