Old prepaid meters will stop working on 24 November if they are not replaced or receive a critical update in time. Hartbeespoort and Brits residents are afraid of being left in the dark should the Madibeng Municipality not succeed in the task.
Prepaid electricity meters are due to stop accepting new tokens after 24 November 2024, unless they are updated through a process called Token Identifier (TID) rollover. The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024, thus causing the prepaid meter to stop accepting tokens.
Electricity suppliers, Eskom and municipalities must execute a relatively simple update project to avoid the issue.
Madibeng Municipality said last year it had 32 875 registered prepaid consumers and 4 700 meters had already been replaced. “Madibeng is completely replacing old Conlog prepaid and old clock domestic credit meters with new split meters, tackling revenue at the same time,” the municipality said at the time. The estimated completion date was June 2024.
Upon enquiry about the progress this week, Madibeng said it had registered “1363 successful rollovers/migration” between 16 and 22 May. The municipality could not provide the total number of meters replaced or the total migrations to date. However, according to the South African Government Association (SALGA) dashboard for the project, Madibeng has so far only reset 4 200 (or 14%) of the meters. Municipalities submit their progress data to a dashboard on the SALGA website.
“The pre-paid rollover process is ongoing and the municipality has registered much progress. The replacement of split metres is also ongoing in different areas of Madibeng. We are confident that we shall meet the deadline of November 2024 and migrate all 22 000 existing prepaid household metres in the Madibeng area of supply”. The municipality could not immediately account for the contradictory information since last year.
According to Madibeng spokesperson, Tumelo Tshabalala, once the prepaid meter has been queued for a TID rollover, the user will receive three tokens on the next purchase. “Tokens 1 and 2 will be your key change tokens, and token 3 will be your normal recharge voucher. Tokens 1 and 2 should be entered in sequence before the recharge voucher. Once the two tokens have been entered and your meter has been successfully rolled over, you can then load your recharge voucher. Please note that all previously purchased vouchers not yet loaded on the meter should all be loaded first before the key change tokens are loaded, as they will become invalid,” he said.