To set it up, ask your Jabber client to subscribe to loadshed@frith.co.za – in Pidgin that’s the “Add Buddy” command, in GMail it’s “Invite to chat”. The loadshed bot will accept your subscription, and reciprocate with a subscription request to you. When you accept it, the bot will send you instructions about how to proceed.

You can search the list of suburbs by sending the message “search [text]“, which will give you a list of suburbs in the City Council’s list with a name matching “[text]“. Then you can subscribe to warnings for a suburb with “subscribe [number]“, where [number] is the number that was listed next to the suburb in the search results. There’s also a “list” command which shows what susburbs you’re subscribed to; and “unsubscribe [number]” which works in the same way as “subscribe”.

The bot will send you warnings 15, 10, 5, and 2 minutes before the load shedding period is scheduled to start. A planned future development is to make the warning times configurable.