Be prepared for ELM pre-paid meter upgrades
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.
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.
Residents 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.
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 pre-paid 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 to prevent an expected Sunday, 24 November 2024 IT shut-down and expiry of present software.
“BXC smart meters have their own dedicated IT system and software and are definitely not affected by the cut-off date”, said BXC Project Manager Dawid Dirks.
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.
“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.
ELM also said they will inform the public how to identify field staff doing the upgrades.
Those experiencing difficulty on uploading electricity on an upgraded pre-paid meter can contact the ELM Electricity Control Room at 087 310 3369 or 087 562 0425 or 087 562 0524 or via WhatsApp at 065 871 7483.
