Our Products

 

ELECTRICITY
Power Communication Africa provides a full comprehensive solution for any electricity metering needs in low voltage, medium voltage, and high voltage. The solution enables continuous analysis and alerts to real-time events in the grid allowing a range of capabilities such as outage management, demand response, and revenue protection. All the meters are fully certified by KEMA and other certification bodies.

The meters are connected to Power Communication’s Meters Data Management (MDM) software and enable online and scheduled readings of energy, current, voltage, frequency, power factor, and other meter load profile parameters. Via the web, authorized utility operators can configure meter settings and receive alerts of unbalanced phases and tamper notification, as well as alerts of other un-normative events via automatic SMS/Email.

Power Communication Africa also offers a solution for consumers to monitor their real-time consumption and schedule the use of individual appliances in the home via an RF dongle for the PC, a unit for displaying consumptionon the home TV, a smart tablet, as well as appliance monitoring and control devices.

Power Communication Africa has overcome the technical barriers associated with PLC, and developed a bi-directional “Dynamic” PLC technology, which delivers real-time (seconds) readings and control from up to 2km (from the Concentrator) over existing low voltage grid lines and the reliability to receive hourly readings from at least 95% of the meters, and 99%+ readings on a daily basis. Power Communication Africa offers a cost-effective and flexible solution, enabling a range of communication protocols and interoperability.

 

WATER
Power Communication "Smart Water Network" AMI solution provides real-time monitoring of events, automatic alerts (SMS/Email), and remote control over network elements. The end-to-end platform incorporates state-of-the-art smart water meters, fixed network 2-way unlicensed RF communications (with the highest level of meter reading reliability), MDM software, all in an interoperable platform which can be connected to third party suppliers. The system also supports STS token pre-payment functionality, non-revenue water reduction (pipe burst/leakage alerts within the hour), online customer access to consumption data, as well as water forecasting.

 

Our Pre-payment System
Power Communication Africa engineering has significantly improved the prepaid systems for electricity and water utilities. Offering an excellent platform for implementing "Smart Grid" solutions while staying within the budget. Power Communication’s smart meters, have the flexibility to control several elements remotely, and have a high level of security on all levels.
Each Power Communication smart meter has the flexibility to switch between pre-payment and post-payment from the MDM software without having to change the meter. 

PowerCom’s prepayment system is an excellent platform for utilities who wish to implement a pre-payment solution based on a "Smart Grid" platform.   The PowerCom solution adopts the guidelines from ESCOM in South Africa which specifies smart metering in smart prepayment systems (NRS049 - Smart Prepayment/Metering, and NRS084 -Load management and Demand response).

Power Communication Africa has engineered a pre-payment system, enabling the operator to remotely control essential elements such as the ability to: (i) remotely credit a meter; (ii) remotely switch between credit and pre-payment; (iii) send immediate online tariff changes; (iv) provide emergency credit; (v) trickle flow or load limiting when credit runs out; and (vi) user friendly pre-notification of disconnections.

By using advanced communications technologies, it is now possible to credit a meter remotely from the point of transaction.  This eliminates the need for a vending machine to purchase credit.  In several Pre-Payment deployments where reliable GPRS communication exists, Power Communication Africa has installed the pre-Payment system without the need for the keypad and relied solely upon the communications to credit the meter.  Power Communication’s reliable two-way communication verifies that the credit was successfully loaded and accepted into the meter, and sends an automatic (optional) SMS or Email to the customer advising that the transaction process has been completed.

Power Communication Africa point of sale direct access is an optional functionality of the system which features basic customer invoicing and payment reconciliations reports.  This vending transaction solution avoids the cost to the utility of the extra payment for the vending payments process.  In South Africa, ESCOM and other municipalities pay in the range of 4-6% for all payment made in the prepayment system.    
   
Security
The Power Communication Africa's prepayment solution is the most secured in the world as it uses two elements.  As well as using the STS code generator for producing the pre-paid token numbers, the Power Communication system benefits by having hourly consumption readings from the meters as well as the balance of KW hours stored in the prepayment meter.   With every increase in the KW hour balance within the system, the system automatically verifies with the billing and vending system whether that increase is backed up by a legal transaction. The system logs all activity with the meter so that it is able to maintain records of the individual who loaded the credit, whether it was performed automatically or manually, the time of the transaction and the amount.  All this information is stored in the database and is available for mangers to verify. 

Parameters According to Each Customer (or Group) Profile
Friendly “over-draft” credit is an option to provide a small amount of emergency credit, so that customers can avoid loss of service in the middle of the night. The average amount can be immediately subtracted from the next payment.  Another option in the case that the customer did not pay on-time is to allow the customer to consume small amounts of energy (only for lights and refrigerator) before full disconnection.  Other options are: customised rates to different classes of customers; and suspension of automatic disconnections on weekends/holidays, during adverse weather conditions, and accounts flagged as “critical need/lifeline” (customers who, for instance, use vital breathing equipment) so that disconnection does not endanger health and safety.
 
Automatic Alerts

The system sends a reminder to customer when their credit is low.  As the account balance approaches zero, the billing system initiates a message to the customer and sends it via an outgoing text message, or email.  The PowerCom customer portal website enables each customer to enter their unique username and password to access their consumption history in graphs according to user selected intervals.