A power station does not take customer service calls. It is an industrial site with an operational control room, and it has no visibility of your account, your meter or your supply. Almost everything people want from one is actually handled by whoever bills them.
ContactDetails.co.za is an independent directory. This page explains how South African electricity supply is structured, so that a fault, an account or a safety report reaches somebody who can act on it.
Establish who bills you first
| Situation | Where a fault or account query goes |
|---|---|
| The municipality bills you | In most metros and towns the municipality buys bulk electricity from Eskom and resells it. Faults, accounts and connections all go to the municipal call centre. |
| Eskom bills you directly | Common in rural areas, small towns and some suburbs. Faults and accounts go to Eskom. |
| You are a prepaid customer | Token and vending problems go to whoever you buy tokens from, which follows the same split. |
| You rent | Your landlord may hold the account. Establish that before reporting, because a supplier will not discuss an account with a non-holder. |
Your account statement tells you which applies, and it is the fastest way to settle the question. Reporting to the wrong party is the single commonest reason a fault sits unattended.
Safety: the part that is not negotiable
- Treat every fallen cable as live. Do not approach it, do not move it, and keep people and animals away. Report it as an emergency rather than as a fault.
- Never enter a substation or open a distribution box. These carry voltages that kill instantly, and the enclosures are locked for that reason.
- Illegal connections kill people and cause the outages around them. They can be reported anonymously through the utility’s crime line.
- Generator and inverter installations must be properly isolated from the grid. Back-feeding electrocutes the line workers restoring your supply, and it is why a certificate of compliance matters.
- A grid-tied solar installation must be registered with your municipality or Eskom, and requires a certificate of compliance from a registered person.
Reporting a fault so that it moves
- Have the meter number and the exact address ready. A fault cannot be logged against a description of a street.
- Say whether it is your property alone or the area. That distinction determines whether a technician or a line crew is dispatched.
- Report a safety hazard as a hazard, explicitly. Fallen cables and sparking boxes are prioritised differently from a supply interruption.
- Get the reference number, and ask for the expected response time. Without a reference there is nothing to follow up on.
- Escalate on the reference, not by logging a second call, because a duplicate report frequently resets the queue rather than accelerating it.
Prepaid meters, tampering and the account behind them
A prepaid meter does not mean there is no account. The supply point is still registered, arrears can still attach to it, and in many municipalities a portion of each token purchase is applied to an old debt rather than to electricity. That is why a customer sometimes buys a hundred rands of tokens and receives far less than a hundred rands of units, and it is an account question rather than a meter fault.
Meter tampering is a criminal offence and it is dangerous. Bypassed meters cause fires and electrocutions, and the person who inherits a tampered installation inherits the liability with it. If you buy or rent a property, ask for the meter to be inspected and the account to be transferred properly, because a tampering finding against a supply point follows the property rather than the person who did it.
Questions people actually ask
Who do I contact about load shedding?
Nobody, in the sense of getting it changed. Schedules are published by your municipality or by Eskom depending on who supplies you, and the app or website is the reliable source. What is worth reporting is damage after restoration, or an area that stays off long after the slot has ended, because that is a fault rather than a schedule.
My bill is enormous and I have not used more electricity.
An estimated reading is the commonest cause. Most municipalities accept a customer reading, and submitting one with a photograph of the meter is the fastest correction. Query the account in writing, keep the reference, and keep paying the undisputed portion, because non-payment risks disconnection even where the dispute is valid.
Can I contact a power station about a job?
Vacancies at generation sites are advertised through the utility’s own careers channels, not at the gate. No legitimate employer charges for a job, a medical or an induction, and recruitment scams cluster around large industrial sites for exactly that reason.
What is a certificate of compliance and when do I need one?
It is a document issued by a registered person certifying that an electrical installation meets the required standard. You need a valid one when a property is sold, and after work that alters the installation, including a generator or solar installation. Insurers routinely ask for it after a fire, and a claim can be refused where none exists.
Regulator and statutory routes on this page were verified against their own official contact pages on 24 August 2026.