A total of 6.6 million prepayment meters pre-coded in Key Revision Number rollover project

Tuesday, 30 July 2024: Eskom has successfully pre-coded 6.6 million out of its 6.9 million pre-payment meters to ensure that customers will be able to continue to seamlessly purchase electricity beyond the 24 November 2024 deadline. This is the cut-off date for meters to be recoded to continue to accept pre-paid tokens.

Without this pre-coding, customers who have not completed the manual Do It Yourself (DIY) recoding process by 24 November 2024 will not be able to purchase or load their top-up prepaid electricity tokens. Additionally, if a meter is pre-coded and the customer buys illegal prepaid tokens from illegal or ghost vendors, they will not be able to recode or load the illegal top-up prepaid electricity tokens.

Monde Bala, Eskom’s Group Executive for Distribution, stated: “We have changed our approach to deliver the goal of making it as easy as possible for customers using pre-paid meters to do so seamlessly after 24 November 2024. We decided to refocus our resources to pre-code the meters via our central systems, in addition to still promoting the DIY approach, where we had been encouraging customers to recode their meters now.”

“Thanks to pre-coding, customers can now effortlessly continue to purchase electricity from authorised vendors with ease after 24 November 2024, safe and confident in the knowledge that their pre-payment meters are either recoded to accept purchased tokens or pre-coded for recoding and can accept tokens purchased through all our official channels,” concluded Bala.

Eskom is urging customers to input all previously purchased credit tokens from authorised vendors into their meter before entering their new meter recoding tokens. Pre-coding of the meters will not impact the usage of old credit tokens until the DIY process is completed. This is crucial as old credit tokens will not function after the meter is recoded by a customer through the DIY process.

Pre-Coding
Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares the meters for the issuance of recoding tokens. This process precedes the recoding, which is a DIY process. For the recoding DIY process, customers whose pre-payment meters have been pre-coded for Key Revision Number (KRN) rollover are required to first purchase their top-up prepaid electricity tokens from authorised vendors and then input the provided key change tokens into their meters.

The progress of the Key Revision Number rollover is monitored daily via a dashboard and customer support is provided through various simplified mechanisms. Easy step-by-step guides are available on various Eskom communication channels, including social media platforms, the Alfred Chatbot for questions and answers (Q&A) and the Eskom website, to facilitate a seamless process.

Eskom would like to remind customers that the recoding of pre-payment meters is a free service and warns against scammers who may try to exploit the re-coding process by requesting payment for this service.

The process of purchasing electricity remains the same. Customers can continue to buy electricity from major banks, online platforms, fuel stations, authorised prepaid electricity vending agents, and retailers nationwide.

Here’s how to recode your meter:

• If you have any OLD tokens, use them up first because they will be invalid after recoding your meter.
Then proceed with the new tokens, as follows:
• Key in the first 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
• Key in the second 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
• Very important! Key in the 20 digits of your purchased token to recharge your meter.

Please refer to the dashboard on the Eskom website for the updated figures of the Eskom Key Revision Number rollover project progress: Key Revision Number – Distribution (eskom.co.za). To log any faults related to KRN, log a fault on https://alfred.eskom.co.za/chatroom/.

ENDS