State-owned power utility Eskom says 6.6-million out of its 6.9-million prepayment meters have successfully been precoded to ensure that customers will be able to continue to seamlessly buy electricity beyond the November 24 deadline.

This is the cut-off date for all prepaid meters in South Africa to be recoded to continue to accept prepaid tokens.

The utility changed its approach to make it as easy as possible for customers using prepaid meters to do so seamlessly after November 24, says Eskom Group Distribution executive Monde Bala.

“We decided to refocus our resources to precode the meters via our central systems, in addition to still promoting the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach in which we have been encouraging customers to recode their meters,” he notes.

Eskom is urging customers to input all previously bought credit tokens from authorised vendors into their meter before entering their new meter recoding tokens.

“This is crucial as old credit tokens will not function after the meter is recoded by a customer through the DIY process,” he emphasises.

In precoding, Eskom prepares the meters for the issuance of recoding tokens, and this precedes the recoding, which is a DIY process.

In the DIY recoding process, customers whose prepayment meters have been precoded for Key Revision Number rollover must buy top-up prepaid electricity tokens from authorised vendors and then input these key change tokens into their meters. The process of buying electricity remains the same.

Meanwhile, Eskom monitors the progress of the Key Revision Number rollover on a dashboard, and customer support is provided through various simplified mechanisms.

There are also easy, step-by-step guides available on various Eskom communication channels, including social media platforms, the Alfred Chatbot and the Eskom website, says Bala.