Remote controlled geysers?

By Tarryn Le Chat
06 September 2006

Households throughout Cape Town will soon be visited by technicians to install load control relays in geysers.

This comes as Eskom and the City’s municipality, in a joint initiative, wants to save on energy during peak periods.

The geysers will be controlled remotely by the municipality and only be switched off during peak hours in homes across South Africa.

So far, over 2 000 have been installed in Kraaifontein, Kuils River, Eversdal and parts of Table View.

However, residents in the ‘wealthier areas’ of Cape Town have refused the installation, saying that they can afford to pay their electricity bill and therefore don’t care about saving electricity.

Eskom’s energy services manager, Tsholo Matlala, has said that current projections indicate that by 2010 South Africans’ demand for electricity will exceed its supply at peak hour periods.

Matlala said, “The Western Cape, in particular, faced problems meeting the demand for electricity.”

In the long run, this would mean that the generation, transmission and distribution systems would not have to be expanded in the short term, helping to keep tariffs down.