Upgrade to prevent pre-paid shutdown
The starting implementation area will be communicated to the public in due course.
VANDERBIJLPARK. – Emfuleni consumers are headed for a Y2K-style shut-down of their pre-paid electricity meters – sparking a race against time for the local municipality to upgrade the software of all such meters by 24 November 2024.
But those with BXC smart meters are not affected by the planned software upgrade, say both the Emfuleni Local Municipality (ELM) and smart meter service provider BXC.
The software upgrade campaign is expected to kick off on Sunday, 1 October 2022 and will run until Sunday 24 November 2024, says ELM spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni.
Although ELM did not provide any statistics, expert sources estimate that around 72 000 pre-paid meters are installed in Emfuleni, although only about 18 000 are functional and paying for power. Those consumers whose prepaid meters are not upgraded will not be able to buy electricity from 24 November 2024, Sangweni warned.
The starting implementation area would also be communicated to the public in due course, said Sangweni.
ELM this week announced a major software upgrade drive for its traditional pre-paid meters – again emphasising that smart meters are excluded – to prevent an expected Sunday, 24 November 2024
IT shut-down and expiry of present software.
“BXC smart meters have their own “BXC smart meters have their own dedicated IT system and software and are definitely not affected by the expected November 2024 cut-off date”, said BXC Project Manager Dawid Dirks.
But those consumers with other pre-paid meters will definitely be completely cut off from the electricity supply from 24 November 2024 as the old software will automatically shut down unless upgraded by ELM, the municipality said in a statement.
ELM has also urged consumers that once informed of their software upgrade, they should use up all their existing electricity tokens as power bought on old software would not be transferable to meters with the new software upgrade.
The ELM media statement said the following on the need for the pre-paid meter software upgrade before 24 November 2024.
“To recharge a pre-paid meter, users enter a unique 20-digit token which is encoded with a unique value called a token ID (TID) and when a meter accepts a token it stores the TID to prevent the same token from being accepted more than once.
“The limit of these unique TID’s will be reached on the base date of 24 November 2024. On this date the TID values will be rolled over back to zero,” said the statement.
