How Much PLN Token Do I Need? What Rp 200.000 Actually Lasts

If you have just moved into a villa or a rental and have no idea what your meter eats, buy Rp 200.000 and note the date. When it runs out, you know your own number, and every purchase after that is an informed one.

That is genuinely better advice than any table we could give you, because the spread between households is enormous. The same Rp 200.000 is two days in one villa and six weeks in the house next door. Air conditioning is almost the entire reason.

A prepaid token does not credit rupiah to the meter, it credits kilowatt-hours. Rp 200.000 becomes roughly 125 to 134 kWh on the common 1.300 to 2.200 VA home tariff, once the regional street lighting tax is taken off. (If that gap between the money and the number on the display surprised you, we explain the arithmetic in why your meter shows kWh and not rupiah.)

How long those 130-odd kWh last depends entirely on the house:

• Large villa, several bedrooms cooled, pool running: about 2 days
• Villa with a few air conditioners and a pool: about 3 days
• Villa with a few air conditioners, no pool: about 4 to 5 days
• One air conditioner running most of the day: about 9 to 10 days
• One air conditioner at night only: about 13 to 14 days
• No air conditioning, just fans and a fridge: about 6 weeks

A 1 PK air conditioner draws around 800 watts, so an eight hour night is about 6,4 kWh. Run three of them and you are at 19 kWh before anything else is switched on. A pool pump is typically 1 HP running six to eight hours a day for circulation, another 5 kWh or so. Everything else in a normal house, the fridge, lights, wifi, water pump, kitchen and water heater together, is around 5 kWh a day.

That is why a fan-only house and a cooled villa with a pool differ by a factor of twenty, and why a single number for "how long a token lasts" would be useless. If your balance is vanishing faster than you expected, the aircon hours are almost always the explanation, not a fault.

The figures above are not just appliance arithmetic. Customers who top up the same meter regularly go through tokens noticeably faster than the theory suggests, and cooled villas with a pool sit right at the fast end. That is why they head the table.

If that sounds like your place, a larger amount saves a lot of topping up. There is no price advantage either way, so it is purely a question of how often you want to think about it.

Rough guide, villa meaning a few air conditioners and a pool, light meaning one air conditioner at night:

• Rp 100.000: about 2 days in a villa, about a week light
• Rp 200.000: about 3 days in a villa, about 2 weeks light
• Rp 500.000: about a week in a villa, about 5 weeks light
• Rp 1.000.000: about 2 weeks in a villa, about 2 months light

Larger amounts work out slightly better value. The electricity itself is priced by PLN per kWh and does not change with the amount, but our price also carries payment costs that stay much the same whatever you buy, so they weigh more heavily on a small token. The euro price of every amount is shown on the purchase page, so you can compare them directly before choosing.

Unused credit sits on the meter indefinitely, so the only real cost of a bigger token is having the money on the meter instead of in your account. The only real cost of a smaller one is topping up more often.

Once you have bought a token, your meter will tell you more than any guide. Note the kWh balance on the display, wait a day, and note it again. The difference is your daily consumption, and dividing 130 by it gives you how many days a Rp 200.000 token lasts in your house.

If you buy from us more than once on the same meter, we do this for you: the purchase page starts showing how long your usual amount tends to last, based on your own history rather than an average.