Prepaid Electricity

We have prepaid electricity at our home. This is a "special feature" that some houses here have, and is considered a good thing, as odd as that may sound.

The usual system is post-paid, in which case you have a little meter in your home that scrolls along (like an odometer) counting how many units of electricity you have used. Every month the electric company comes and reads your meter and produces a bill and delivers the bill to your home. You then take the bill and go to the electric company's office in town and pay it.

This system can go awry if 1) they come to read your meter at a time when you are not home and thus they cannot get to the meter to read it; 2) they do not deliver your bill in a timely fashion or they attempt to deliver it when you are not at home to receive it; or 3) you are late to go pay it. Then they come out to your house and cut off your electricity.

For people who work full-time, it is basically impossible to be at home at the right time to have a meter read or a bill delivered. And since if we weren't home they would probably give the bill to our landlord instead of to us, then we would have to rely on our landlord to deliver it to us quickly so we don't get our electricity cut off. As you can see, that is all rather complicated and problematic!

So, we are blessed that the tenants previous to us had a prepaid electricity meter installed. (This came about after several instances of cutting off their electricity when the aforementioned system did not work well for them.) So now our system is that we go to the electricity office and pay them however much we want to pay. They give us a receipt with a 20-digit number on it. We go home and enter this number into the meter and voila! It then shows our new amount of units remaining. For example, the other day we were down to 763 units in the morning, so we realized that by the end of the day, we'd be in the dark if we didn't get some more electricity soon. We went and paid 50,000 shillings (about $30 US) and got a receipt (you can see Andrew holding it). Andrew entered the number, and suddenly we were up to 30,000-some units.

It's a little risky in that we have to remember to check our meter and buy more electricity when we need it. It's our own fault if our power goes off now - we can't blame anything on the power company or landlord with this system! (Excepting power outages, of course, which are still happening daily.)

Side note: despite power outages, our electricity bill is not any lower these days. The power company has simply raised the price of electricity per unit used, so that even though they keep the country in the dark about 12 hours a day, they aren't losing any money.