Then the load shedding stopped. The last round was in May 2025, and South Africa has now gone more than 16 months without it. For a lot of Johannesburg homeowners, that has turned a system that felt essential into one that feels like an expensive box on the wall.
It isn't. Its job has changed. A system bought to survive outages now has three different jobs: cutting your bill, staying safe as it ages, and keeping you on the right side of the law. Most systems in Joburg were never set up for any of them.
The grid got more reliable. Eskom puts the run without load shedding down to better power station performance and fewer unplanned breakdowns. That doesn't mean the power never goes off. Substation faults, cable theft and load reduction in some areas still cause local outages, so backup still has some value. It just isn't the whole point any more.
Electricity kept getting more expensive. City Power's tariffs went up 8.63% on 1 July 2026, and the prepaid energy blocks went up by about 9%. On top of the price per unit, a residential prepaid customer now pays R210 a month in fixed charges before using a single kilowatt-hour. That's R241.50 including VAT.
The system got older. A system installed in 2022 has been through four Highveld summers. Every hot afternoon and cool night heats and cools its connections, and every day its battery charges and discharges. Some of those systems were installed carefully. Many were installed in a hurry by whoever was available, and nobody has looked at them since.
A system set up for load shedding is set up to protect you from an outage. Typically, the battery is held full, or close to it, all day, just in case. Some systems top it up from the grid overnight.
That made sense in 2023. In 2026 it means your battery sits full while the sun shines, and you still buy expensive grid power in the evening, when the house uses the most.
A system set up to cut your bill does the opposite. It uses the solar during the day, charges the battery from the sun rather than the grid, and spends that stored energy in the evening instead of keeping it in reserve for an outage that may not come. It still keeps enough back for a sensible amount of backup, but not the whole battery.
The signs your system is still aimed at the old problem:
None of that means anything is broken. It usually means the system is configured for the wrong year. We call it mis-tuned, not broken.
Solar systems don't fail loudly. A connection that was never tightened properly works a little looser every summer. A cheap connector joined to a different brand of connector runs a little hotter every day. A battery slowly loses capacity until it can't carry the house through the evening.
The dangerous part is on the DC side, between the panels and the inverter. It carries high voltage whenever there is daylight, and it can't be switched off. A bad DC connection can hold an arc long enough to start a fire. That's why a system nobody has checked since 2022 is worth checking now, not after something goes wrong.
This is the one almost nobody tells you. Under the Electrical Installation Regulations, the user of an electrical installation is responsible for its safety, safe use and maintenance. In a home you own and live in, that's you. Not the installer who has moved on.
Two practical questions follow from that:
You can do all of this yourself in an evening, without opening anything.
One caution: don't change settings in the inverter you don't understand. Some of them control how the system connects to the grid and how it protects itself. The battery reserve is fine to look at. Changes to export and grid settings are a job for a registered person.
Download our free checklist, "Is your solar system legal and safe?". It takes ten minutes and tells you whether your system is worth having looked at.
If you'd rather someone checked it for you, that's what we do. We check, fix, register, re-tune and maintain existing solar systems across Blairgowrie, Linden, Randburg, Ferndale, Northcliff, Fairland, Emmarentia, Greenside, Parkhurst and the suburbs around them.