Cutting Your Electricity and Water Bills: Meters, Geysers, Appliances and Leaks in South Africa

The one thing

You pay for kilowatt-hours and kilolitres. Know what one of each costs you this month, and every saving in this book becomes a rand amount you can count. §1.3 shows how block tariffs work.

What You Pay For

Every household’s electricity and water bill is made up of a few parts:

• electricity used, in kilowatt-hours (kWh): a kettle running for half an hour, a geyser heating water, a fridge humming all day;
• water used, in kilolitres (kL): showers, toilets, washing, the garden;
• fixed charges on many accounts: a monthly amount for the connection or service, paid whether you use a lot or a little;
• sanitation (sewerage), often worked out from your water use;
• on a municipal account, also property rates and refuse removal, which this book does not try to reduce;
• VAT at 15 % on most of these.

Who sells it. Most households buy electricity from their municipality, which buys it from Eskom; some buy directly from Eskom. Water comes from the municipality. Prices are set in tariffs, which change every year, usually on 1 April (Eskom) or 1 July (municipalities). For 2026/27, Eskom’s direct tariffs rose by about 8.8 %, and the average approved for municipalities was about 9 %; your municipality’s own increase may differ.

Units: Kilowatt-hours and Kilolitres

Electricity. A watt measures how fast an appliance uses electricity; a kilowatt is 1 000 watts. A kilowatt-hour is 1 kilowatt used for one hour:

• a 2 000 W kettle boiling for 30 minutes uses 2 kW × 0.5 h = 1 kWh;
• a 10 W LED bulb on for 100 hours uses 0.01 kW × 100 h = 1 kWh.

Chapter 3 shows how to work this out for every appliance in your home. Water. A kilolitre is 1 000 litres: about 12 full baths, or 100 buckets of 10 litres. A household of four can easily use 20 kL or more a month.

Block Tariffs and Fixed Charges

Many municipalities use inclining block tariffs for electricity and water: the first units each month are cheaper, and each further block costs more. The aim is to keep basic use affordable and make heavy use pay more.

What this means:

• using less saves more than you expect: the units you cut come off the most expensive block first;
• on prepaid, the blocks usually reset at the start of each month, so the first units you buy each month are the cheapest and later purchases cost more (ask your municipality how its blocks work);
• fixed charges do not change with use, so on a low-use month they are a bigger share of the bill.

Prices and blocks differ between municipalities and change each year. Find your own tariff on your municipality’s website or account, and write it in your savings file with the date.

Worked Example 1.1 — Ntombizodwa’s units

Ntombizodwa Mahlobo (41) lives in Soshanguve with her husband and three children, on prepaid electricity. Her municipality’s example tariff has Block 1 (0 to 350 kWh) at R3.00 a kWh and Block 2 (above 350 kWh) at R3.60. In October she spends R1 300 on electricity. The first 350 kWh cost 350 × R3.00 = R1 050. The remaining R250 buys R250 ÷ R3.60 = 69.4 kWh in Block 2. She gets 350 + 69.4 = about 419 kWh for R1 300. If the family could use 70 kWh less a month, every one of those units would come off Block 2, saving 70 × R3.60 = R252: almost all of the second purchase.

The lesson: with block tariffs, the last units you use are the dearest, so cutting use saves at the top price.