When doing a electrical contract part of the electrical contractors responsibility is to get the municipalty to do the main connection. The proceedure for this differs from area to area. I will talk about the Stanger area [KwaDakuza], as it is the area we are most active.
The proceedure here is when the contract is started a commencment form is submitted to the municipality, they then go out and do a quote and submit it to the client who then has 30days to pay and the connection is then done, sounds simple enough. Nothing could be futher from the truth i have waited 4 months for a quote to be sent to client, eventually the house nearly finished i had to drive and collect the quote and drop it off at the client so they could get it paid and we could get power in time. Power in time[my mistake] now the client has paid for them to do the connection and this is a fairly inflated price. I then get a call telling me to pick up the materials and do the installation because they dont have the man power, Hmmmm, something smells bad because i run a business and can't afford to do all the connections for free as some could take a day or two depending how far we have to run the cable. So the client ends up paying twice for the same job otherwise they would have to move in without power or wait till there is somebody available. One of my clients decided to wait and it took 9 months in total to get power onto the site.
How does everyone handel this? What is a solution to this? My one would be simple let the private contractors do their own connections?