Leak Detection
A leak beside a drain never surfaces. Traced with listening and thermal equipment and marked to a point before anything is dug.
View service →Home / Florentia
A plumber in Florentia deals with water that turns up where it should not and vanishes where it should: eight dry days in May 2026, a burst that drained unseen into the stormwater, and sewage rising into back yards. We cover Florentia, Alberton North and Verwoerdpark, with a free quote and an agreed price.
Tell us the street and what you are seeing. If sewage is rising in a yard gully, or the whole street is dry, say so first, because both change who needs to be called.
The same team and pricing as the rest of Alberton, pointed at what this part of town has had to deal with.
A leak beside a drain never surfaces. Traced with listening and thermal equipment and marked to a point before anything is dug.
View service →Sewage in a yard gully means a blockage somewhere downstream. Whether it sits in your line or the City's is settled before any clearing is quoted.
View service →No hot water, a weeping overflow or a split tank, repaired where it can be, and the warranty looked up before a replacement is mentioned.
View service →Backup water sized in days rather than hours, after an outage here that ran from 22 to 30 May 2026.
View service →Selling in Florentia? The plumbing clause in your offer to purchase sets what is inspected, and we work from its wording.
View service →When something bursts, the first minutes go on finding your stopcock over the phone, then we come and make it safe.
View service →From 22 to 30 May 2026, Florentia and Alberton North were without water, and the Alberton Record followed the repairs as they happened. Three faults turned up in sequence. The pressure reducing valve at the Alberton North reservoir was faulty and had its diaphragm replaced, which did not bring the water back. A major leak on the bulk pipeline feeding the reservoir, near the N12, lay under rock and was finally repaired on the evening of Friday 29 May.
The water still did not come back. On the Saturday morning, crews followed the main line and found the third fault: an underground burst on Jacoba Road, leaking into a stormwater drain and invisible from the surface. A burst main is about as large a leak as a suburb can have, and it still took a deliberate search to find, because it had somewhere to go.
That is the part worth taking home. Water escaping under pressure follows the easiest path, and a drain is the easiest path there is. A leak with a stormwater channel, a gully or a sewer pipe beside it does not need to push up through the lawn. It runs away clean and quiet, and the wet patch that would normally give it away never forms. On a residential erf the supply pipe and the drains often share a route from the boundary to the house, which gives a leak exactly that kind of exit.
So in Florentia, look in the drains as well as at the ground. On a dry day, with every tap in the house closed and nobody using water, lift a gully grid or look into the stormwater outlet at the kerb. Clear water running when it has not rained and nothing indoors is on needs an explanation, and if the meter dial is turning at the same moment, the explanation is on your side of the boundary. Our leak detection page explains how the trace goes from there.
Clear water in a drain on a dry day is a leak until something proves otherwise. Looking costs nothing, and it catches the leaks that never show on the lawn.
Florentia and its neighbours, on the same terms as the rest of Alberton.
Four commitments you can check once the job is done.
If the fault is in the main or the street sewer, you get told who to report it to, not a quote.
One spot comes up, found with equipment rather than a trench dug on a hunch.
A figure in writing before anything starts, and pricing the job costs you nothing.
Parts and labour apart, which a billing dispute with the City or an insurer will want.
The May 2026 outage, sewage in yards, backup water, pressure and selling.
The same as anywhere else in Alberton, because Florentia is part of it. Coming to look at a job and price it costs nothing, the figure is agreed in writing before work starts, and the invoice separates parts from labour. Our plumbing prices page sets out how a price is built and what can be quoted over the phone.
Three faults, found one after another. The pressure reducing valve at the Alberton North reservoir needed a new diaphragm, a major leak on the bulk line feeding the reservoir near the N12 had to be dug out of rocky ground, and when the supply still did not return, crews traced an underground burst on Jacoba Road that was leaking into a stormwater drain. Ward 37 councillor Ivan Naidoo said supply began returning once that burst was repaired. Florentia and Alberton North were dry from 22 May until most homes were reconnected on 30 May.
It depends where the blockage is, and Florentia has argued this point in public before. In 2022 a resident told the Alberton Record that raw sewage had flooded her yard every year since she bought in 2018, and a neighbour blamed tree roots in the sewer near a manhole; the City said the blockage it cleared was caused by rags, and gave its turnaround time as 48 hours. If the yard gully is overflowing while the fittings inside drain normally, the obstruction is likely downstream and the City should be called. Our blocked drains page shows how to tell.
Probably more than you would guess. At around 200 litres per person a day, eight days is a lot of water, and the honest answer depends on how hard you are willing to ration. Our article on water tank size for an Alberton home works it through for two, four and six people, using that outage as the worst recent case, and shows what each common tank size buys you.
It is worth having regardless. The City manages pressure across the network, reducing it in high-demand areas and closing reservoir outlet valves at night so storage can recover, and May 2026 showed that the valve controlling a reservoir can itself go wrong. A pressure reducing valve on your side of the meter evens out whatever arrives, which protects the geyser, the toilet valves and the joints from the swings. Our water pressure repairs page covers how it is sized.
Yes, and they belong together for more than geography. When the Meyer family's farm Elandsfontein was divided after 1894, Johan Georg Meyer bought the land that is now Florentia and Verwoerdpark, and the part that became Alberton North went to the five Meyer daughters; the family farmhouse was in Fick Road, Florentia. Alberton North also shared Florentia's eight dry days in May 2026. We cover New Redruth, Randhart and Raceview next door on the same terms.
With the plumbing clause in the offer to purchase, because outside Cape Town the requirement comes from the agreement, and its wording decides what has to be inspected. Send us that paragraph and the transfer date. Our plumbing certificate of compliance page explains what gets checked and what happens if something fails.
Yes. The point to get right on any Alberton roof is frost: a Johannesburg cold snap in 2010 destroyed several hundred direct solar systems whose collectors froze and split, which is why the system type and its frost protection should be named in the quote. Our solar geyser installation page explains the choice, and conversions of an existing electric geyser are often possible.
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Need a plumber in Florentia, Alberton North or Verwoerdpark? Send the street and what you are seeing, and you will get a price back with nothing owed if you decide against it.