Hey, Riversale,
meet HotBot™

You can participate in Project Smart Geyser and get a free HotBot if you meet the following criteria:

• Your home is located in Riversdale
• You spend more than R900 (or more than 400 kWh) on electricity per month
• Your geyser is a standard electric geyser (excluding solar and gas geysers) 
• Your geyser is accessible

If you’re not eligible right now, you can sign up for our waitlist and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can bring HotBot to your home.

HotBot should become the only way you control your geyser’s electricity use. That means you need to make sure that you remove or bypass any timers or other geyser controllers from your home, and rather manage your hot water through the app.

Demand for electricity is not flat, rather it peaks in the mornings and the evenings. Our electricity grid struggles the most during these peak periods, when available electricity supply often falls short of demand and Eskom burns a lot of diesel to try to keep the lights on. Often they simply can’t keep up, or need to save the diesel to serve other times of the day – leading to loadshedding.

Solar by itself is not the answer as it produces most energy during the middle of the day, and does very little to address our peak problem.

HotBot solves both of these problems. Your HotBot can coordinate with all other HotBots to intelligently shift energy demand away from times when Eskom is burning diesel or we’re at greatest risk of loadshedding, and towards times when more solar energy is available – while making sure that you have hot water when you want it.

Project Smart Geyser is sponsoring 100 HotBots in Riversdale. This project brings together partners, including EEP Africa, the City of Cape Town, Hessequa and GIZ, to improve energy reliability and efficiency in South Africa. This sponsorship means we can get HotBot technology out there so together we can end loadshedding.

By getting a HotBot, you’ll be part of a groundbreaking project that shows how Hessequa is at the forefront of creating a clean energy future.

Your municipality will not control your energy use. Instead the system starts by making sure you have hot water when you want it, and heats in a way which saves you as much money off your electricity bill as possible.

After that, heating will be adjusted to meet a combination of three goals: avoid using electricity during peak times (when electricity is dirtiest and most expensive to generate), ensure that geysers don’t all heat at the same time (to avoid putting excessive strain on our electricity infrastructure), and heat as much as possible during sunny times. Your municipality will not have direct control of your geyser.

You will receive 24 months of free service, thereafter you will be notified that you can choose to continue the service for a small monthly fee or cancel our service (at no cost to you). We believe you’ll quickly see the value that HotBot can bring to your home. Our aim is for HotBot to pay for itself from the money it saves you on electricity each month.

After you place your HotBot order online, you will receive a link to book a convenient installation time. A HotBot-accredited technician will arrive with the device and install it for you. Once HotBot is installed, you can register on the Plentify app and start saving! 

HotBot is a small device (17cm x 15xm x 6cm) which is installed adjacent to your existing geyser. The power to your geyser is run through HotBot, and it has several sensors which attach to your hot water system. You can expect the installation to take about 2 hours to complete.

HotBot still works with geysers despite most non-compliance issues. Depending on the nature of the non-compliance, certain features may not work. For example, some hot water systems allow valves to drain into the drip tray instead of being directed outside with a pipe – in these cases it is not possible to distinguish between this and leaks. Our technicians will notify you of any compliance or other issues that they find with your geyser, and can assist in rectifying at your cost if you choose.