Eskom and its retail partners have surpassed three million households in the company’s “key revision number rollover” project. The project, whose purpose is to update the country’s 6.8 million prepaid meters so that they can accept a new set of larger recharge tokens, must be completed by November.

“Reaching this milestone of recoding three million ‘key change tokens’ gives impetus to our commitment to ensure that all our 6.8 million prepaid electricity meters are recoded before the deadline of 24 November 2024,” said Monde Bala, group executive for distribution at Eskom, in a statement on Friday.

“We are grateful to our customers for embracing the do-it-yourself process. Our teams are available to promptly assist those customers who are experiencing challenges and have logged queries with reference numbers.”

According to a previous statement by Eskom, the decision to change the length of prepaid tokens was administrative, since the permutations on previous sets were close to being exhausted. Even though the length of prepaid tokens has changed, customers have been notified that the process for buying electricity, through whatever channel they prefer, will not change.

Read: Eskom calms fears of prepaid meter ‘catastrophe’

The updates are done region by region and, at some point, a customer will receive an additional recode token with the purchase of a recharge token. At this point, Eskom advises that customers should:

Key in the first 20 digits of their recode token and wait for it to be accepted;
Key in the second 20 digits of their recode token and wait for it to be accepted; and
Importantly, key in the 20 digits of their purchased token to recharge your meter.