JoJo Tank Installation
in Durban

Five things make up the figure: the tank, the base it stands on, the pump set, the plumbing that ties it into the house, and the electrical supply to the pump. The tank is what people price first, and on a full backup installation it is rarely the whole story. Labour sits inside the trade's published national band of R450 to R850 an hour before VAT. Ask for those five as separate lines, because it is the only way to compare two quotes for what will actually be built.

eThekwini's Water By-law says an owner who wants installation work done must first obtain the Municipality's written approval, and the drawings submitted for it show every storage tank, its capacity and every pump. Repairs to an existing pipe or fitting are exempt, but a new tank tied into the house supply is not a repair. The work itself is reserved for a contractor or plumber registered with the Municipality. A tank that only catches rainwater and never touches the house plumbing is a different question, and the rainwater answer further down covers it.

Not under the by-law, and not usefully either. Section 52 says water that is to be pumped from the supply system must be pumped from a storage tank fed by gravity from the main. In practice, a pump drawing straight off the main during a rationing window is trying to pull water that is not arriving, so it runs dry, overheats and fails. A tank between the main and the pump solves the legal question and the mechanical one at the same time.

Start from your municipal account rather than a tank brochure. The bill shows kilolitres used over the billing period, and a kilolitre is 1,000 litres, so dividing by the number of days gives your household's daily use. Multiply that by the number of days you want to ride through, or by the fraction of a day an outage window takes, then add a margin. The second test is whether the tank can refill in the hours your supply is actually on, which matters most on throttled zones like the one on the Chatsworth page.

Anywhere that can carry it, which is a shorter list than it sounds. Water weighs about a kilogram a litre, so a full 5,000 litre tank puts roughly five tonnes on its base and a 2,500 litre tank half that. It needs a level, compacted base or a slab sized for the load, room for the inlet and the overflow, and a pump position that is dry, ventilated and near a power point. A tank raised on a stand gains some gravity pressure but multiplies the engineering, so a stand is designed rather than improvised.

An electric pump with no power gives you a full tank and no pressure. There are three honest answers. A tank set high enough can feed some outlets by gravity at low pressure. The pump can run from a battery backup or an inverter if the house already has one. Or you accept that the tank covers water outages but not the days when both go at once. Which of those makes sense depends on how often the two coincide at your address, and that is your call rather than ours.

Not into the municipal side. Section 77 of the by-law says no interconnection may be made between an installation carrying water supplied by the Municipality and one carrying water from another source, unless backflow into the municipal side cannot occur. In practice a rainwater system stays separate, feeding a garden, a toilet circuit or a washing machine on its own pipework, or it discharges into a storage tank through a proper air gap. A hose or a pipe joining rainwater to a municipal line is exactly what that section prohibits.

It will if the water keeps moving through it. When every litre the house uses passes through the tank on its way to the taps, the tank turns over daily. A standby tank that only opens during an outage can sit for weeks, and water that sits is where taste and quality problems begin. An opaque, sealed tank with a screened overflow and an occasional clean keeps it in good order. The design choice that matters most comes first: water flowing through the tank, not past it.