WHILE Eskom is preparing to roll out prepaid electricity meters to all South African communities before the cut-off date of November 24, only 6.6 million of the 6.9 million meters have been pre-coded for the Key Revision Number rollover ahead of the deadline.
Eskom is phasing out old electricity meters in favor of new, technologically advanced prepaid meters to combat illegal electricity connections, theft and meter tampering.
Eskom announced that it has pre-coded 6.6 million out of its 6.9 million pre-payment meters to ensure that customers will be able to buy electricity beyond the November deadline.
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Residents who have not completed the manual Do It Yourself (DIY) recoding process by November 24 will not be able to buy or load their top-up prepaid electricity tokens.
Additionally, if a meter is pre-coded and a customer buys illegal prepaid tokens from unauthorised vendors, they will not be able to recode or load these illegal top-up tokens.
Eskom urged customers to input all previously purchased credit tokens from authorised vendors into their meters before entering their new meter recoding tokens.
Also read: Changes to electricity meters in South Africa
In a statement, Eskom said pre-coding of the meters will not impact the usage of old credit tokens until the DIY process is completed. Old credit tokens will not function after the meter is recorded by a customer through the DIY process.
Pre-coding
Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares the meters for the issuance of recoding tokens. This process precedes the recoding, which is a DIY process.
For the DIY recoding process, customers whose prepaid meters have been pre-coded for Key Revision Number (KRN) rollover are required to first buy their top-up prepaid electricity tokens from authorised vendors and then input the provided key change tokens into their meters.
Eskom reminded customers that the recoding of prepaid meters is a free service. The power utility reassured residents that the process of purchasing electricity will remain the same.
The members of the public can continue to buy electricity from major banks, online platforms, fuel stations, authorised prepaid electricity vending agents, and retailers nationwide.
How to recode your meter:
• If you have any old tokens, use them up first because they will be invalid after recoding your meter.
Then proceed with the new tokens, as follows:
• Key in the first 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
• Key in the second 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
• Key in the 20 digits of your purchased token to recharge your meter.
To log any faults related to KRN, log a fault on https://alfred.eskom.co.za/chatroom/
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