Water supply is the question to ask before you take a Nairobi unit

Nairobi’s mains supply is rationed in much of the city, which everybody who lives here knows and no visiting guest does. Buildings bridge the gap with storage tanks and boreholes, and the quality of that arrangement varies enormously. It is the most important thing to establish about a building and the thing least often asked about.

The questions that reveal the truth

“Is there water?” gets a yes from every agent in Nairobi. These do not.

1. What is the total storage capacity, in litres, and how many units share it? Divide one by the other. That number tells you how many days the building can run without a delivery
2. Is there a borehole, and is it currently working?Boreholes fail and are expensive to fix, so a building may have one that has been out of service for a year
3. How often does the building buy water by tanker?Regular tanker purchases are not a disaster, they are a cost, and they tell you the mains supply is unreliable
4. Has the building run out in the last twelve months?Ask a resident rather than the manager
5. Is the borehole water treated, and is it soft or hard?Untreated borehole water can be very hard, which destroys kettles, heaters and shower screens, and leaves guests complaining about residue
6. Is the pump on the building supply or my unit’s meter?If it is on your meter, an empty prepaid meter means no water. See managing prepaid electricity
7. Who pays for water, and how is it charged? Some buildings submeter, others fold it into service charge. It changes your cost base for a short let, where consumption is high

Total storage divided by number of units is the single most useful number about a Nairobi building, and almost no buyer ever asks for it.

Test it rather than trusting it

• Run a tap and a shower at 6am and at 9pm on a weekday, when the whole building is using water. Midday tells you nothing
• If you can, test on the top floor of the building, where pressure is worst
• Look at the taps and shower screen in an existing unit. Heavy limescale tells you what the water is like more honestly than anyone will
• Ask a resident on your floor. They have no reason to sell you anything
• Visit during the dry season if you can, which is when the supply is under real pressure

What you can do about a weak supply

Some of this is fixable at unit level and some is not, and knowing which is which saves money.

• Fixable: pressure. A booster pump and a decent shower head solve most complaints where water is arriving but weakly. See hot water and pressure
• Fixable: hardness. An inline filter or softener on the incoming supply protects your heater and kettle and stops guests complaining about residue
• Sometimes fixable: unit level storage. A small tank for your own apartment, where the building permits it and there is space. Worth investigating
• Not fixable: the building running dry. If total storage is inadequate and there is no working borehole, that is a building level failure you cannot engineer around, and it caps your rating permanently

Managing the guest side

• Never ask guests to ration water. It is the wrong request to make of someone paying a nightly rate
• Do explain, briefly and without alarm, in the house manual how the building’s supply works, so an interruption is context rather than a crisis
• Keep a couple of large bottles of drinking water in the apartment. Nairobi tap water is not something an international guest will drink, and this small provision is noticed
• If an interruption happens during a stay, tell the guest before they discover it, say how long, and offer something. Most people are reasonable when informed and unreasonable when surprised
• On longer stays, check in mid stay. Water problems build up rather than arriving suddenly

How Goldstay handles it

We ask for storage capacity, unit count and borehole status before taking on a Nairobi short let, and we test pressure at peak hours rather than accepting an assurance. Where the building cannot deliver, we recommend a long let, and we say why.

If you would rather not run any of this yourself, it is what our Airbnb management service in Nairobi exists to do.

Related reading: backup power and the maintenance handbook for diaspora landlords.