Three short guides that cover the parts of a South African electricity bill people most often get wrong: which number to use as a rate, which tariff actually applies to your address, and how to turn an appliance label into a rand figure.
Reviewed: 18 October 2026 · Tariff schedules and effective dates can change; always confirm against your own bill.
The guides build on each other. If you only have a minute, read the first one and open the calculator — the rate on your bill is almost always better than a rate someone else quotes you.
Find the energy or consumption charge, check whether it is quoted in rands or cents per kWh, note the billing period, and separate the charges the calculator does not include. This is the guide to read before entering a rate.
Read the guideMatch the published schedule to your supply area, customer category, meter type and tariff plan. Explains why blocks, time-of-use periods and capacity charges mean one flat rate cannot reproduce every bill.
Read the guideThe watts, hours and days calculation, worked through with a kettle example in rands, plus how to handle thermostatically controlled appliances like fridges and geysers whose real draw varies.
Read the guideHowever you arrive at a figure, it rests on the same three inputs. Getting these roughly right matters far more than the precision of the arithmetic.
South African residential electricity is not priced at one national rate. Eskom direct customers sit on different schedules from municipal customers, municipalities publish their own tariff books on their own cycles, and many schedules include rising block prices, seasonal differences or time-of-use periods. A calculator that silently substituted an average would look more confident and be less useful.
So the calculator estimates the energy portion at the rate you supply, states plainly what it excludes, and links to the supplier's own document for the published figure. Where a number on this site is an arithmetic example rather than a quoted tariff, it says so.