- Many South Africans are making efforts to secure their own water supply by installing boreholes or water tank systems.
- This comes as crumbling water infrastructure is making water outages an increasing issue.
- While water tank systems are likely to be much cheaper than a borehole, extended outages may still pose a threat.
- For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.
Dilapidated water infrastructure is causing increasingly frequent and extended water outages in many parts of the country, prompting residents to take measures to secure their own water supply. At the time of writing, thousands of Johannesburg residents are in their second week without water supply to their homes, with spluttering pump stations and burst pipes to blame for the outages.
President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged the scale of the water supply issue, which is affecting many parts of the country, at his imbizo in Mpumalanga last week and promised to solve it.
“Water is a challenge in many parts of our country. In a number of places, because of ageing infrastructure and in other parts, because of shortages. We are a water-scarce country,” he said.
Two main options
However, residents are increasingly taking matters into their own hands, and securing their own water supply to the greatest extent possible. The two main options are to drill a borehole or to buy a tank to provide an emergency reserve.
While installing a tank system is likely to be significantly cheaper than a borehole, it is difficult to store enough water on a residential property to ensure security of supply for an extended time.
News24 spoke to several business representatives offering alternative water solutions to municipal supply to get a sense of the cost and points of consideration for the different systems.
First option: Tanks
Llewelyn Tait, the owner of Create Mechanical, a company that installs backup supply water tanks for residents in northern Johannesburg, said that he started the company as “a joke” to keep himself busy, but demand has been massive.
He said that the company essentially plugs a water tank of whatever volume the customer desires into a household’s normal municipal water supply and adds a water pump. This creates an emergency reserve in case of an outage.
READ | It’s not that we aren’t doing anything, we’re going to fix water problem, says Ramaphosa
He said that the product is a “grudge-buy”, and that demand “is 100% from the frustration of not having water supply”.
Tait said that the most basic system, with a 1 000 litre plastic tank and ideally located power supply, will cost around R16 000 inclusive of labour and the pump.
A 1 000-litre JoJo tank is listed on the Builders Warehouse website for R2 499.
He said this would be a fairly standard installation, but if one wanted a larger tank or three connected tanks, for example, this would be closer to the R28 000 price point.
He said that he had three tanks installed at his own home, and estimated this had added R45 000 in property value.
READ | Waterless wasteland: Joburg taps run dry for second week as systems buckle
Tait said that the rate at which the tank will be depleted depends on usage, but it would be fair to assume it will be depleted at roughly 250 litres per adult per day if people are not taking any special measures to taper their usage. He said that it is possible to reduce this to below 100 litres per day.
This point was backed up by Graeme Hale, the owner of Rain Queen Tanks, a manufacturer of corrugated iron products, including water tanks.
He explained that it is difficult to store enough in a tank, even when it is filled with rainfall, to ever be completely independent of municipal supply when in a normal residential area.
“To have an alternative to municipal water and rainfall is difficult, because the volume of water required should we go into a drought period, it’s just not possible to store that amount of water,” he said.
He said that a typical residential estate household of four people using roughly 600 litres of water per day with a 5 000-litre tank, will secure supply for less than 10 days.
Hale added:
With the way things are going in Joburg at the moment, I think 10 days is not going to be enough.
The company charges R13 750 for a 5 000 litre corrugated steel tank.
Given the difficulty of ensuring security of supply with a tank, Hale said that the company is more focused on designing products that ensure water is being used effectively.
“With electricity, there are numerous ways of creating energy sources. There is no way to create water. The way we view it needs to be completely different.”
Zahid Hussain, the director of Aqua Tanks, a company that manufactures roughly 36 000 plastic tanks a year, said that the primary motivation for installing a rainwater-collecting tank remains the potential water cost savings, followed by ensuring security of supply and concerns about the safety of municipal drinking water.
Second option: Boreholes
Anthony Whitfield, the director of Blue Dot Drilling, a residential borehole drilling service provider, explained that the costs associated with the installation of a borehole system are dependent on a multitude of factors.
If a borehole is drilled and hits water, Whitfield explained that a series of tests are conducted to assess things such as the chemical composition of the water and the amount of water that the hole can draw.
These results, as well as the desired use case of the water by the borehole owner, will change the hardware requirements for the system owner.
He said that the total off-grid residential borehole system cost that one could typically expect is between R100 000 and R110 000, inclusive of all labour and equipment.
In a blog post, Gauteng Boreholes estimated that the drilling cost comes out at R500 to R1 500 per metre, meaning the drilling cost can be between R20 000 and R60 000 for a domestic borehole.
Whitfield explained:
With a borehole, it’s very difficult, because your filtration system could cost you R3 000 or it could cost you R20 000. You could buy a variable speed drive pump for R20 000 or you could buy a pump that does the same job, for R4 000.
Whitfield said that the return on investment is generally quite fast, as savings from municipal water costs generally accrue quickly.
Money savings over a few years and the fact that municipal water outages can go largely unnoticed by borehole owners are the primary drivers of demand, Whitfield said.
Ruan Naudé from Stark Borehole said that the volume of boreholes drilled by the company has increased steadily since 2007.
Naudé said that Stark was currently drilling between 18 and 22 boreholes a month.
Most of the company’s business comes from the areas between Hammanskraal and Bapsfontein, “in the water-scarce municipalities like Johannesburg”, said Naudé.
Alex Patrick contributed to this article.