Top tips to reduce electricity woes
As load-shedding looms and electricity costs skyrocket consumers need clever tricks to cut consumption. Here’s expert advice
IT HAD become an almost-forgotten bad dream. The emergency supply of candles, the gas ring on the stovetop, the torch beside the bed, the dead traffic lights, the deathly darkness cloaking suburbs and townships . . . Load-shedding, the big bad wolf of a few years back, was mercifully a thing of the past. Medupi, the giant power plant near Lephalale in Limpopo, was finally up and running and the even larger Kusile plant near Emalahleni in Mpumalanga had started contributing to the power grid. Which meant lights on forever, right? Not so fast. The spectre of days and nights in the dark and cold once again hangs over South Africans as Eskom recently warned of renewed load-shedding – and followed through on its threats in certain areas of the country.
The reason? Well, there are many – but mainly it’s because the utilities giant is rumoured to be flat broke due to maladministration and alleged corruption during the Jacob Zuma years.
This is why new Eskom management under the leadership of former Land Bank CEO Phakamani Hadebe, appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to remedy the ailing business, recently informed workers they wouldn’t be getting a raise this year.
But workers’ unions were demanding between 9% and 15%. There are also threats of job losses. All this is the driving force behind a workers’ strike that’s negatively affecting operations at certain power plants. One of the issues is that coal deliveries couldn’t get through because of the strike, resulting in a huge knock-on effect and a crippling backlog to work through.
At the time of going to print Eskom bosses had offered a 5% pay increase in a bid to put an end to the wage dispute and keep the lights on, but this had been rejected by all three of the major unions involved – the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) and Solidarity.
When all is said and done, Eskom’s latest troubles relate directly to a stateowned enterprise “where finances have been mismanaged to the point of ruin”, says Dawie Roodt, head economist at the Efficient Group. And it will take some years to fix things.
It seems dark times lie ahead for South Africans. We look at ways you can use less electricity and, well, lighten the load on your monthly budget.
WAYS TO SAVE
Buy energy-efficient appliances The department of energy is running a campaign to get manufacturers to display appliances’ energy efficiency on a label. This way consumers can buy smart and pay less for electricity use in the long run.
The standards and labelling programme (S&L) is run in conjunction with the department of trade and industry and has the backing of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility.
“Implementation started in 2011,” says Theo Covary, a researcher with the UNDP and spokesperson for the S&L programme.
Laws making these labels mandatory on common household appliances – such as washing machines, electric ovens, fridges, freezers, dishwashers, air conditioners and geysers – came into effect in 2016 and 2017, Covary says.
The S&L programme also stipulates sales staff have to help consumers interpret the information on the labels. How it works The law requires specific appliances to comply with minimum standards of energy efficiency. But the energy-efficiency label takes this further by providing detailed information about a specific appliance, such as its power consumption.
Consumers can use that information to calculate the appliance’s running costs – annually or per cycle or use. It also provides an opportunity to compare products before buying the most cost-effective one.
The South African energy-efficiency label has a grading of seven levels: A to G, A+ to F, A++ to E or A+++ to D
(depending on the type of appliance). “It’s intuitive, with A being most efficient and colour-coded green, moving down the scale – or alphabet – to less efficient and red,” Covary explains.
Detailed information about the labelling is published on the department of energy’s website about energy efficiency, savingenergy.org.za.
There’s also an app available from Google Play and Apple App stores called the Appliance Energy Calculator that lets you input information from the various appliances’ labels, then calculates in split seconds how much the electricity use of an appliance would cost over a certain period, such as 10 years.
Eskom is rumoured to be flat broke due to maladministration and alleged corruption during the Jacob Zuma years
Should I replace everything at once? Rather replace items with more energyefficient models as and when the old ones become too old or break down.
Covary advises consumers to be sensible and buy the appropriately sized appliance. A larger fridge, for example, might cost less initially per volume, but use more electricity than a smaller one that’s the right size for you.
Efficient energy conservation has two facets: efficient appliances and usage patterns, he says.
A good example is LED lights. By replacing your old 100W bulbs with modern 20W LEDs, you’ll have the same amount of light while using considerably less electricity.