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I found out from www.PrePaidMeters.co.za that the CBI PrePaid Meters that have been purchased by landlords and letting agents in the past are no longer supported.
I am not sure why or how this came about however; this is what I
find from people that call www.PrePaidMeters.co.za to get tokens for
CBI Meters which of course is not possible because the meters on PrePaid Meters are not the same prepaid electricity meters.
I heard that that CBI was providing meters for Eskom at one point in time, but no longer do that also from what I hear.
This does not mean that landlords should go without prepaid meters
or prepaid electricity metering solutions or without tokens for
electricity. What it does mean that they will likely have to replace
those prepaid electricity meters now.
It stands to reason that this may not be the most wanted option to
invest more in a new PrePaid Electricity Meter however the thought of
generating arrears is far more unpleasant than just replacing a metering device with another.
Things of this nature happen in all the time in technology areas, companies stop product lines others get bought out by other companies that completely “kill” product lines and replace them with new products this is not new.
But fortunately a PrePaid Meter only costs a few hundred rands which compared to the life cycle of an income producing property and the rental received installing meters and occasionally having to replace one is a cost of being in business and ensuring that risk of arrears is reduced.
So, in essence if you have a CBI PrePaid Electricity Meter you can replace it to a similar system if there is no longer support or tokens. It only takes a week to do this and really it is very easy and you can find out exactly which meter is similar to what you are using on www.PrePaidMeters.co.za .
For those that need to understand why one can’t they buy either electricity tokens of scratch cards from another vendor you can read on to understand better this issue.
When you own a PrePaid Electricity sub-meter in essence your meter is connected to that company which will provide a system to buy tokens or scratch card for that meter.
When that company no loner supports the meter or the system you can’t go to another company just to get a token or a scratch card because it won’t work with your meter.
It is very similar to buying a scratch card for a cell phone with units and trying to put the units in another cell phone that is connected to another network, it won’t work.
Hope this post was helpful if you are in this situation and if you want to know more about this you can go to www.PrePaidMeters.co.za .
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