Warning to South Africans who want to get rooftop solar power and keep their Eskom grid connection

Thank goodness almost everyone is on prepaid and is not getting ripped a new one yet.
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deweyzeph said:
Good luck trying to cancel your electricity account with a municipality.
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This guy did it.
D

Thread 'coj off-grid process'

Hi All.

I am currently busy with the process for going off-grid. My supplier is Citipower and I am Postpaid.

Reason for going through? The high fixed charges. 1.4k a month. It’s way to high to stay connected otherwise if I was paying current prepaid tariffs I would keep the connection.

First visit was about a month ago. Was told by the person assisting that it’s not something they do and it’s a Citipower issue. Citipower mirrored the same from COJ and said it was a COJ problem.

It obviously was going to turn into a bank and forth. So I asked the Citipower gent to write me a note...
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The article mentions Homepower 4 and its increases. I'm on Homepower 1 and network fixed fees are substantially higher than 4 so already at R700 fixed. Not as bad as City Power's prepaid but we'll get there I'm sure.

Knowing them, in addition to fixed increases next they'll bring in TOU with something outrageous for evening time where they can then squeeze the final life out of the people without enough battery capacity to see through 'til morning.
 
Flanders said:
The article mentions Homepower 4 and its increases. I'm on Homepower 1 and network fixed fees are substantially higher than 4 so already at R700 fixed. Not as bad as City Power's prepaid but we'll get there I'm sure.

Knowing them, in addition to fixed increases next they'll bring in TOU with something outrageous for evening time where they can then squeeze the final life out of the people without enough battery capacity to see through 'til morning.
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City power prepaid fixed fees are R240. You should move to eskom prepaid.
 
wingnut771 said:
City power prepaid fixed fees are R240. You should move to eskom prepaid.
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Which is their tariff with the R1400+ fixed?

They won't let me go to prepaid. What they will let me do is, if I register my system, I get put on Homeflex with TOU, free of charge, no questions asked. :p The peak rate is extortion and the off peak is when I use the sun/batteries. Of course you can mitigate the effect of peak time with batteries but during bad weather you sit without in a big way as a grid topup becomes like a petrol topup. Think I'd rather just stick with the flat rate option for now.
 
Flanders said:
Which is their tariff with the R1400+ fixed?

They won't let me go to prepaid. What they will let me do is, if I register my system, I get put on Homeflex with TOU, free of charge, no questions asked. :p The peak rate is extortion and the off peak is when I use the sun/batteries. Of course you can mitigate the effect of peak time with batteries but during bad weather you sit without in a big way as a grid topup becomes like a petrol topup. Think I'd rather just stick with the flat rate option for now.
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The R1400 fixed is city power post paid.

You may aswell register then so you can sell back to the grid (up to a point) and use offpeak rates to charge battery:
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I can recall that a overseas power energy company did a assessment at Eskom. They stated that the power generation by Eskom show that Eskom is 60% overstaffed. The average salary at Eskom is R1. 16 million per year which makes the average worker a millionaire and now they are asking for increases. Employ compotent people than we can have cheaper electricity again same as before 1994 when the country was amongst the cheapest for electricity.
 
Warning to South Africans who want to get rooftop solar power and keep their Eskom grid connection
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Solar should be going up in the next few weeks - fortunately I'm not South African so I'm safe.
 
itareanlnotani said:
Why would you want to keep the grid connection?

Its been cheaper to self provision for a long long time now.
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because the ROI on the last 10% (even worse when you have to factor in 3 days of no sun) is more than keeping grid connection and other times people are not allowed to run gennys in their complex and most people on eskom direct are prepaid so dont pay any fees for the grid nor people who live in pretoria and durban and jhb prepaid is R240 and cape town is R425.
 
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