New app cushions households from power bill shock

Walter Obadha during the interview at Nation Centre in Nairobi on Wednesday. Salaton Njau 

By Sandra Chao,

In Summary

• Varsity student’s innovation helps electricity users to work out monthly charges for appliances and plan ahead.

The high inflation rate witnessed in the last one month following the implementation of the new Value Added Tax Act has driven up the cost of living.

Kenyans, especially in towns where the cost of living is relatively higher than in rural areas, are trying hard to minimise their expenses and do away with the luxuries to pay for utilities like electricity and water.

Walter Obadha’s mobile application provides a means for prepaid users of electricity can predict monthly power usage and budget appropriately.

“I was in a situation where I was blamed for using a lot of electricity because I left my computer on most of the time, so when I went online and discovered that people had similar problems with their electricity bills I decided to do something about it,” says the 23-year-old.

He adds that Efficient Electricity Management System (EEMS) is a mobile-based application that helps users cap their electricity expenses by calculating the number of units that each appliance uses in the house per month.

With the total number of units for each month calculated, a user is then given the exact cost of the units that is in line with the billing systems of the Kenya Power.

Prepaid electricity consumers are therefore able to know the amount of tokens that would last them last them for the whole month.

“The system is based on the way Kenya Power bills the units per hour and thus it is able to give more accurate results for users,” he says.

The software which is available on the Google applications store is built for Android phones and users can download it for free.

“This is the first EEMS prototype and I chose to give it to the public for free on Google Play store because that is where many people go for applications and games. I wanted to see how it would be received by the public,” he adds.

The landing page of the application is about EEMS and how users can benefit from it.

Users are able to choose whether to calculate and manage their household electricity appliances or contact their nearest Kenya Power office whose numbers are arranged by region.

The next step involves a selection on the exact number of appliances whose costs a person wants to calculate — ranging from six to 18.

“When someone thinks of appliances they think about fridges, computers, microwaves and other electricity consuming household items but they often forget that phone chargers, water heaters, bulbs and fluorescent tubes in their homes also consume watts,” says Obadha.

He adds that while he has received feedback that the number of appliances could be lesser than six within a household, he notes that if every electricity consuming appliance was to be itemised in a modest individual’s house the average would be six.