Decreasing Electricity Costs With PrePaid Electricity Meters

Last year (2008) was a tough year for South African households. As interest rates rose 7 times, mortgage bonds killed excess cash in household budgets. Adding to the problems, petrol prices sawed making an already difficult situation even harder.

Adding to the problems South Africans were faced with "load shedding" power failures to decrease the load on the utility companies which couldn't cope anymore with the high demand on the infrastructure.

Hot on the heels of the "load shedding" debacle, South Africans received the news that Electricity Prices will have to be increased.

Depending on area, utility prices were hiked between 14% and 20% in various areas to upgrade infrastructure, once again placing additional financial pressure on households.

Utility companies have stated that increases are not flat rate but per usage. In other words, the more you use the higher tariffs you pay. For this they created prices breaks per usage. This in turn created a situation where the household has become responsible for using less electricity in order to avoid the higher bracket tariff rates. But how would a household use less, when they only find out how much they use when the bill arrives? At which point it is of course too late to turn back the clock and reduce usage.

Both households and commercial properties need the use of a system that can help them monitor consumption on an ongoing-basis during the month. Greater transparency into ongoing consumption creates greater awareness with which people can take steps to cut usage and conserve in order to reduce consumption before the bill arrives.

For this reason, many residential houses, landlords with tenants and commercial premises have started to use secondary prepaid meters. Such meters enable daily monitoring of use by way of a digital display. When one sees the usage daily, one can take action based on this input. One can replace old devices, trying new devices that are more electricity efficient, switch off lights when and where these are not necessary, etc.

Furthermore, there is no longer a need to budget for electricity usage. Once the usage is prepaid, one can reduce the usage for that budget to last longer. It helps both with budgets and especially with better cash flow in households.

Since the increases in electricity tariffs more tenants both residential and commercial are asking landlords to install secondary meters simply for monitoring purposes. Once installed a very interesting phenomena has been found. Many users of prepaid electricity meters significantly change the electricity usage habits.

Electrical heaters are replaced with cheaper heaters that use gas, geyser timers are installed. Geysers are one of the largest contributors to domestic electricity bills. Timers enable users to switch on their geyser for only a few hours in the day during periods when hot water is required. Other people are buying electricity saving light bulbs, they are far more expensive than normal light bulbs but can cut 1000's in the electricity bill for many months.

In summary, it was found that prepaid electricity was once considered a bad thing because you have to dish out the money in advance, proved to be extremely useful when reducing the use of electricity and therefore the month electricity bill.

One of the major barriers to people and commercial properties using prepaid electricity was payment habit. Why pay in advance, when you can deal with it later? However, since the increases in electricity tariffs, this barrier has been lowered. Consumers that were once unhappy about prepaying for electricity are now happy that prepaid meters have been installed. They never thought they could save so much in electricity until they started monitoring their own use.