Why plumbers get called in Roodepoort
Rainfall, altitude and distance from the sea decide what fails here and when. These are measured for Roodepoort itself, not written about the province.
When drains get tested
Rain here falls in summer, about 609mm a year with January the wettest month and July the driest. Drains that coped all winter meet their first real test in the first heavy storms.
Winter freezing
Roodepoort gets around 7 nights a year below freezing, at 1736m above sea level. Exposed pipes, outside taps and uninsulated geyser feeds split when water in them freezes, so the burst-pipe season here is the cold snap, not the storm.
A leak here can become a sinkhole
About a quarter of Gauteng sits on dolomite, and 96% of the province's recorded sinkholes and subsidence events were caused by people rather than nature, most often by water escaping from leaking pipes and badly managed stormwater. More than 1,000 have been recorded on the West Rand and around 800 south of Pretoria and in Centurion. A slow leak you would leave for a month elsewhere is worth fixing this week.
SourceOld mains, and a lot of them leaking
Johannesburg Water reported non-revenue water of 44.8% for 2024/25, with unaudited figures later in 2025 closer to 48%. Much of the 12,364km network is over 80 years old and only about 17km was replaced in 2023/24. Mains bursts rose from 301 to 328 per 100km per year between 2012 and 2025. If your pressure drops or comes back dirty, the cause is often the street, not your house.
SourcePressure that moves
Johannesburg Water has refurbished around 750 pressure-reducing valves to cut background leakage. Lower and more variable pressure is easier on the mains but harder on a household: intermittent supply pushes air into pipes, and the water hammer when it returns is what finishes off a tired connection or an ageing geyser inlet.
SourceScale is not the problem it is overseas
Most plumbing advice online is written for Britain or Europe, where hard water furs up a geyser element in a few years. South African municipal supply is soft to moderately hard, so scale is rarely what kills a geyser here. Age, thermostat failure and corrosion are.
SourceClimate figures: Open-Meteo ERA5 daily, 2020-2024.