Eskom may target electricity thieves, non-payers during

Tats easy! Just shut down all of Soweto. Power problem solved.
 
porchrat said:
If someone is consisting making use of your product for which you charge a fee and they do not pay they are not customers. The use of this word demonstrates the wrong attitude.

My main concern is that if someone is a legitimate customer of Eskom (i.e. pays his/her electrictiy bill each month) but happens to live in an area like Soweto he/she is going to be smashed by load shedding unfairly.
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I had a heated debate about this when I used to work for eskom. Their electrification dept said I was being unfair for wanting electricity thieves to be arrested and their connections to be sent to the back of the queue. I was told that they are also customers and have been waiting long. My argument of law abiding citizens waiting long as well fell on deaf ears. So yeah, if you want power, steal it. Then if you get caught, demand a meter. Job done. If you've been waiting patiently, just wait longer. Its the African way.

SilverCode said:
Instead of just trying to disconnect illegal connections, they should first send a massive power spike through the illegal connection, blowing whatever electronics are on the other end. Then disconnect them. The thieves would then have less incentive to reconnect illegally, since a) They no longer have a working TV, and b) if they acquire a new one, it runs the same risk of being blown.
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My deceased uncle did this at a munic a couple of years ago. They switched off all prepaid meters in the location then put 3Ph 380v power on the single phase 230v line and popped just about everything that wasnt supposed to be on. Its a "clever" move, but a dangerous one at that. You never know what's connected to where.
 
I vote we rank areas by % stolen/non payment (as a total of that area) and if load shedding is required, we turn those areas off first. Only when and if we need to shed more capacity we look to other law abiding areas to reduce load.
 
Flapping lips and doing nothing as usual . :twisted:
 
What is this "may"?

They SHOULD be cutting them off first...and permanently.
 
Problem is - this is SA. If people are unhappy with bad train service - they burn the train.
Cut the power to a area with a high volume of illegal use, and they'll burn down the substation - or the big one outside of town.

I like it though - but first focus on the companies with illegal connections. There you can throw the law and SARS at them.
Personally - we need to renegociate those 'special' rates those big smelters have. That is a lot of lost capital.
 
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Compton_effect said:
Problem is - this is SA. If people are unhappy with bad service train service - they burn the train.
Cut the power to a area with a high volume of illegal use, and they'll burn down the substation - or the big one outside of town.

I like it though - but first focus on the companies with illegal connections. There you can throw the law and SARS at them.
Personally - we need to renegociate those 'special' rates those big smelters have. That is a lot of lost capital.
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Go ahead and burn it down in their area, more power for us.
 
Au contraire, mon ami

porchrat said:
Fortunately one party regarding another party as being in contravention of an agreement does not give that first party the right to deliberately destroy the second party's property.
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In a normal country this would be true. You forget too, that when you commit a criminal act such as theft, you lose a great deal of the protection that the law offers. If you commit a murder, you should not expect to be treated gently. If you commit a theft, you should not expect your ill gotten gains and other property to be protected. If you hook up to take a service from someone that has no agreement with you, you have no expectation of the level of service you will receive - neither availability, nor voltages, current nor frequency.
 
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cfilorux said:
In a normal country this would be true. You forget too, that when you commit a criminal act such as theft, you lose a great deal of the protection that the law offers. If you commit a murder, you should not expect to be treated gently.
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I don't think you should expect any more or less violence than anyone else depending of course upon how you respond. Equality before the law.


If you commit a theft, you should not expect your ill gotten gains and other property to be protected.
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What you steal isn't your property. So yea that can be recovered.


If you hook up to take a service from someone that has no agreement with you, you have no expectation of the level of service you will receive - neither availability, nor voltages, current nor frequency.
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There is a difference between an accident and malicious damage to property.
 
porchrat said:
Fortunately one party regarding another party as being in contravention of an agreement does not give that first party the right to deliberately destroy the second party's property.

Imagine if some dude lost your payment confirmation one month and then charged into your home and beat your TV to death with a baseball bat in retaliation. LOL what a world. :p
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There is a major difference between someone not paying and someone deliberately stealing. The first is breaking an agreement while the second one is breaking the law where there is no agreement in place. I say give the fsckers their due.
 
It's easy to prosecute on an illegal connection, proving how much electricity they have stolen is a little more difficult.
 
Liberté, fraternité, equalité

porchrat said:
I don't think you should expect any more or less violence than anyone else depending of course upon how you respond. Equality before the law.
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If you do commit a murder and you are treated with anything short of extreme violence and death, you can count yourself grateful that you receive more mercy than you gave. What you don't think and how you respond is of very little weight compared to the life that you took unlawfully: equality of that life and yours before the law.
 
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Here's a shocker, business is the biggest electricity thief:

http://www.iol.co.za/the-star/business-behind-sa-power-crisis-1.1831072

This article is also bit dated, but the point is the same. There's a lot of theft amongst industrial users too and the impact is far more significant than a few households:

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-07-15-industry-is-biggest-power-thief/

To quote: "Electricity worth about R792-million is stolen by predominantly mid-size businesses, roughly two- thirds of the R1.2-billion of power stolen from Eskom each year."

As the article points out, it is not 'the people of Soweto' that are the biggest offenders - sorry to challenge the comfortable world view of many forumites
 
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I don't see how businesses can owe that much. If we don't pay our power gets cut. Even if we actually paid for our electricity portion. The biggest defaulters in this country are most likely municipalities themselves.
 
Then you get the ritch that jippo thier power meters , because they too stingy
 
Swa said:
I don't see how businesses can owe that much. If we don't pay our power gets cut. Even if we actually paid for our electricity portion. The biggest defaulters in this country are most likely municipalities themselves.
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I went to Joburg when I was responsible for telemetry at MTN (over 15 years ago) and was astounded at how many business meters were not read because they were not accessible (guard dogs, electric fences, locked basements etc) and the industrial users could clock up quite a bill.

The local government perspective is as follows: http://www.salga.org.za/NewsArticle/188 (although that includes all services). These are big numbers
 
Chris.Geerdts said:
I went to Joburg when I was responsible for telemetry at MTN (over 15 years ago) and was astounded at how many business meters were not read because they were not accessible (guard dogs, electric fences, locked basements etc) and the industrial users could clock up quite a bill.

The local government perspective is as follows: http://www.salga.org.za/NewsArticle/188 (although that includes all services). These are big numbers
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They still pay if they aren't read. It's easy to work out an average from previous usage.
 
Only now?? And they should actually do it not just consider it. After all, it's the right thing to do
 
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