South Africans looking for ways to use less electricity this winter probably don’t need to start by unplugging their phone chargers. The bigger savings are hiding in much less glamorous places: the geyser quietly reheating water, the heater running for hours, the tumble dryer finishing a load that could’ve dried on a rack and, in some homes, a pool pump operating on a schedule nobody’s thought about in years.
That matters more as electricity becomes steadily more expensive. There isn’t one national municipal tariff increase because local authorities set their own tariffs within the regulatory framework, but the direction is hardly comforting. Electricity prices in major metros have continued to rise in recent years, with increases typically announced annually by municipalities and regulated through NERSA approvals. NERSA has separately published its decisions covering municipal electricity tariffs for the 2026/27 financial year.
The temptation is to respond by policing every switch and charger in the house. Some of that helps, particularly when multiplied across millions of households, but the appliances drawing the most electricity deserve attention first.
Start with the geyser
Few pieces of household technology are as easy to forget about as a geyser because, when it’s working properly, you barely interact with it at all. It also happens to be one of the biggest electricity users in many South African homes.
The South African government’s Take Charge energy-saving guidance says geysers can account for as much as 30% of household electricity demand during peak periods. Other government guidance has previously put water heating at between 30% and 50% of a household electricity bill, depending on the home and how hot water is used.
That makes small changes here much more meaningful than obsessing over whether your Bluetooth speaker is plugged in.
Government guidance recommends setting a geyser thermostat to around 60°C and says reducing the temperature by 10 degrees can cut water-heating electricity consumption by about 5%. A geyser blanket can also reduce heat loss, particularly on older units, while exposed hot-water pipes can be insulated to stop some of the heat disappearing before the water reaches the tap.
There’s a qualification worth making before everybody starts treating the distribution board like a daily light switch. Whether constantly switching a geyser on and off saves substantial money depends on hot-water usage, insulation, thermostat behaviour and the length of the off period. The more reliable savings come from reducing unnecessary hot-water use and stopping heat from escaping in the first place.
A shorter shower therefore has a much more plausible effect on a winter bill than charging your phone at a particular time. Cape Town’s energy-saving guidance says showering rather than bathing can use considerably less hot water, which means less electricity has to be spent reheating the cylinder afterwards.
Heating is where winter changes the equation
South Africa’s electricity consumption becomes particularly awkward during winter evenings because several high-demand activities collide. People arrive home, cook, switch on lights, use hot water and start heating rooms at roughly the same time.
Eskom identifies the evening period between 17:00 and 21:00 as the country’s household electricity peak and specifically points to geysers, space heaters and other large appliances as the places where demand can be reduced most meaningfully.
A heater can also dwarf most consumer electronics in power consumption. Eskom says electric space heating can account for up to 17% of evening peak household demand and recommends heating only rooms that are actually being used.
Comfort doesn’t necessarily require choosing between shivering and accepting a huge bill. Closing doors to unused rooms, stopping draughts, closing curtains once the sun goes down and allowing winter sunlight into a room during the day all reduce the amount of heat that has to be replaced electrically later.
Where an electric heater is necessary, a thermostatically controlled model can also avoid continuously drawing full power once the room has reached the desired temperature. Eskom has recommended thermostatic heaters for exactly that reason.
Electric blankets occupy an interesting middle ground. They still consume electricity, but heating a bed directly for a short period makes considerably more sense than heating an entire bedroom for hours. Eskom recommends switching an electric blanket on before bed and turning it off rather than leaving it running through the night.
The tumble dryer deserves some winter suspicion
Winter makes line-drying laundry harder, particularly in Cape Town when the rain arrives just as you’ve run out of clean socks. It doesn’t automatically make the tumble dryer the only option.
The City of Cape Town recommends using sunshine where possible and an indoor drying rack when the weather doesn’t cooperate, rather than automatically running a tumble dryer.
That advice sounds mundane because it is. Energy saving at home often isn’t about buying some miraculous new piece of technology. It’s about noticing which appliances convert large amounts of electricity into heat and asking whether they genuinely need to be doing it for as long as they are.
Kettles are another obvious example. Eskom recommends boiling only the amount of water you need rather than repeatedly heating a full kettle. You can still have the tea. You simply don’t need to boil enough water for everybody on the street.
Your small electronics matter, just much less
This is where headphones, portable speakers and other battery-powered technology enter the conversation, although perhaps not in the way their manufacturers would like.
Running entertainment devices on their internal batteries means they don’t need to remain connected to mains power throughout use, while products that can last for days between charges reduce how frequently you need to plug them in. That’s useful behaviour, particularly during peak demand or an outage. It shouldn’t be confused with the savings available from managing a geyser or heater.
Sony’s current audio range is a decent illustration. The ULT FIELD 5 is a portable Bluetooth speaker built around an internal battery, with Sony rating it for up to 25 hours of playback under specified conditions. A ten-minute quick charge can provide roughly 100 minutes of playback.
The WF-1000XM6 earbuds similarly use a rechargeable case and are designed around long stretches of listening away from the wall socket. Sony also includes a battery-care function intended to limit the time the battery spends sitting fully charged, which is more relevant to battery longevity than to making a noticeable dent in a household electricity bill.
Sony’s larger WH-1000XM6 headphones follow the same pattern: long battery life and fast charging mean they can spend far more time unplugged than connected. We looked at the WH-1000XM6 in more detail when Sony introduced the headphones in South Africa, including their 30-hour rated battery life and fast-charging support.
There’s still an electricity benefit to efficient battery-powered electronics. It’s simply a small one. Replacing hours of mains-powered entertainment with devices that sip electricity during an occasional recharge can reduce consumption around the edges, and being able to charge outside the evening peak can help shift some demand. Nobody should buy a R6,999 pair of earbuds because they expect the electricity savings to pay them back.
Don’t mistake visibility for consumption
Part of the problem with saving electricity is psychological. We notice the devices we touch.
You can physically see the charging icon on a phone, watch the battery percentage on a laptop fall and hear the speaker that’s using electricity. A geyser is somewhere in the ceiling doing its job without asking for attention, which makes it remarkably easy to worry about the wrong things.
The hierarchy matters. Start with water heating. Look at how and where the home is being heated. Avoid unnecessarily converting electricity into heat through tumble dryers, ovens and kettles. Replace inefficient lighting as bulbs fail and switch off rooms nobody’s using. Government guidance says replacing incandescent lamps with LEDs can reduce lighting electricity consumption dramatically, although the impact on the total household bill will depend on how much lighting contributes in the first place.
Then deal with the smaller electronics.
Switching off standby devices, unplugging chargers once they’re finished and choosing products with decent battery life are all reasonable habits. They become misleading only when they’re presented as though they belong in the same league as a geyser or heater.
South Africans don’t need to turn winter into an exercise in discomfort to use less electricity. They do need to know where the electricity’s actually going. Once you do, the slightly absurd ritual of running around the house unplugging every phone charger while a 2kW heater warms an empty room becomes much easier to spot.