Durban - Residents have been urged not to turn on their geysers in the first 10-20 minutes after the electricity has been restored following load shedding, to avoid a power surge that might cause outages for prolonged periods.
Head of electricity in eThekwini Municipality Maxwell Mthembu said power outages as a result of this surge would leave residents without power for longer as the only solution was for city workers to go to each individual substation and restore the power.
Mthembu issued the warning when he spoke to The Mercury about the new load-shedding schedule that comes into effect today and which will see the City load shed from Stage 1 onwards.
The municipality had been exempted from the normal schedule used in the rest of the province and country, after its infrastructure was damaged by floods last April.
Mthembu said while the city would stick to the times prescribed for load shedding, it was possible that when the power came back on, it could go off again due to overloading.
Another reason customers might not have their power restored at the prescribed time, Mthembu said, would be due to the vandalism of infrastructure while the power was off.
“It is a request from all of us in eThekwini to the customers who will be experiencing load shedding that while you are off, switch off the geysers, as these appliances contribute the biggest load,” he said.
He said this problem of power surges caused by geysers was common in areas like uMlazi and New Germany.
“When the power has tripped, the only way to restore it is manually, sending electricians to restore power to each individual substation.”
The head of electricity said there were about 20 substations that would not be load shed because they were fragile or were being rebuilt, and it would take three years to fix them.
Mthembu revealed that communities supplied by the Mariannridge substation would not endure any load shedding for the next three years due to the damage to the substation.
“The station was burnt to ashes so we are putting a temporary board, we are running a mobile substation there so we cannot do load shedding, that means the community affected in the area that includes KwaNdengezi will not experience load shedding over the next three years.
“There are many others where we have a problem relating to the protection system, and because of that we are excluding them from the load shedding schedule,” said Mthembu.