Cape Town - Bishop Lavis residents were in a state of panic this week after discovering their prepaid meters required new coding to prevent inactivity.
A lack of official notice left many residents, especially the elderly and unaided, confused.
Finance and Economic Opportunities MEC Mireille Wenger said municipalities across the country were in a race against time to enable residents to update prepaid electricity and water meters before they stop working on November 24.
The update is required as the standard system that provides unique recharge codes will soon run out of unique numbers to issue.
A “reset” code for each pre-paid meter is therefore essential to ensure that residents can continue to receive unique codes beyond November.
Bishop Lavis ward councillor Charles Esau said some residents were left in the dark over the upgrade.
“I want to assure you that I did communicate via community groups about the coding and am still doing so. Eskom is currently moving from area to area assisting clients to recode and on Friday they were in Bishop Lavis to assist the residents,” he said.
Resident Cherise Davids said that they had been informed by Sassa officials who visited their homes that they would need to reprogramme their boxes.
Riccardo Pucci, marketing manager at the TID Rollover, said meters globally would stop accepting new tokens unless the change process was completed.
If there are tokens already loaded into the meter, it will continue to dispense until it runs out, but will not be able to accept any new tokens.
Cape Argus