Load reduction is not load shedding — and that matters for your bill
Eskom and big metros increasingly run quiet, targeted 'load reduction' on prepaid suburbs that are over-drawing. It's invisible on the official load-shedding app. Here's how to tell which one you're on, and how it affects your prepaid units.
Load reduction is not load shedding
If the lights go out in Soweto, Tembisa, Mamelodi or Khayelitsha at 5am and 5pm every weekday, but the EskomSePush app says "Stage 0" — you are almost certainly on load reduction, not load shedding. They are two different things and they have different consequences for your prepaid budget.
What load reduction actually is
Load reduction is a targeted, scheduled cut on a specific feeder where Eskom or the metro distributor has detected sustained over-loading — typically from illegal connections, bypassed meters, or simply more demand than the transformer can carry safely. The goal is to protect the network from a much longer unplanned outage.
It is most common in:
- City Power suburbs in Joburg (Diepkloof, Eldorado Park, Riverlea, Westbury) - Eskom-direct townships across Gauteng (Tembisa, Soshanguve, Mamelodi East) - City of Cape Town informal settlements where transformers regularly trip - eThekwini's INK area (Inanda, Ntuzuma, KwaMashu)
How it affects your prepaid units
The units themselves don't get more expensive during load reduction. But two things happen that hurt your budget:
1. Resistive loads catch up at peak hours. When the power comes back at 7pm, every geyser and stove on your street fires up at the same time, pushing many households over the [Inclining Block Tariff](/tariffs) threshold faster than they would otherwise. 2. You buy more, more often. Short outages encourage "top-up" purchases — but the [vendor service fees and bank charges](/vendors) on small purchases are a higher proportion of the spend.
What you can actually do
- Check whether your suburb is on the published load-reduction schedule (City Power and Eskom both publish them; eThekwini publishes daily on its X feed). Use our [meter and municipality lookup](/lookup) to find the right channel. - Buy bigger amounts less often — you stay inside the cheaper block longer. - If you're on FBE, the 50 kWh allocation arrives regardless of load reduction. It is not consumed during the outage hours.
We're a reader-supported site — see our [disclosure](/disclosure).