Water and plumbing
Water in a Phuket villa: the tank, the pump and the day it runs dry
Water is invisible until the morning a shower runs to air with a full house inside. This is how a villa on this island is actually supplied, what the equipment in the plant room does, where it fails, and what someone should be looking at every week.
Where it comes from
A villa here is not plumbed like a house in Europe.
In most European cities water arrives from one place, at a steady pressure, and the only thing you own is the tap. Across Phuket six different arrangements are in use, sometimes two on the same plot, and everything between the supply and your shower belongs to you.
The provincial mains, where the pipe actually reaches
The provincial waterworks network covers a great deal of the island, but it stops where the road stopped when it was laid, and villas sit above and beyond that line. Where it does reach, the pressure at your boundary is not the pressure you get at a first floor shower head, especially at the end of a branch or on a high plot. Pressure also sags in the dry months, when the whole network is drawing on reservoirs that have not been refilled since the rains. None of this is a defect. It is simply why the tank exists.
The municipal network, if the house is in town
Phuket Town is not on the provincial utility. The municipality runs its own waterworks, with its own meters, its own office and its own repair schedule, which is unusual in Thailand and catches out anyone who assumes one supplier for the whole island. It matters for a plain operational reason: when there is a fault, the number to call and the body that owns the pipe are not the same as they would be a few kilometres up the road. Establish which network a property is on before you need to report something on it, and write the answer in the house file rather than rediscovering it at seven in the morning.
A private network, metered by somebody you have never met
Plenty of lanes and small clusters of houses are served by a private or village network: somebody drilled, laid pipe, and now sells water by the meter to the houses along it. It works, often for years, and it is entirely normal here. What nobody guarantees is continuity of service or what it will cost next year, because there is no utility standing behind it and no obligation to keep supplying you. If a villa is on one of these, that is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to ask who owns the network, what happens the week their pump fails, and whether the plot could be connected to mains if it ever had to be. Almost nobody asks that before buying.
The estate supplies it and bills it
In a number of developments the juristic person runs its own internal network and meters each villa. Read what your estate documents actually say, because they usually set the boundary of responsibility: the estate fixes its side, you fix yours, and the two rarely meet in an obvious place. Some estates also restrict tanker access or require deliveries to be arranged through them. That is worth knowing before the week you need water urgently, not during it.
Delivered by truck
Plenty of villas are filled by tanker, either because there is no mains connection or because the mains alone cannot keep up with a full house. Someone orders, a truck comes, the tank is filled. Two things follow from that: the truck needs physical access to the tank, which narrow lanes, steep driveways and low cables sometimes deny, and delivery has a lead time that gets longer in the months everyone needs it. A trucked villa is not a worse villa. It is a villa where somebody has to be paying attention to a level.
A borehole on the plot, and the permit that goes with it
Some houses draw from their own well. It feels free because no meter reading arrives, and it is not. It runs on your electricity, it wears a submersible pump that is awkward and expensive to lift when it fails, and the water quality is whatever the ground gives you. It is also regulated equipment rather than a private convenience. Under Thai groundwater law a well needs a permit to be drilled and a separate permit to be used, registered wells are meant to be metered, and use carries a usage charge and a conservation fee, with relief for small domestic volumes but no exemption from the permit itself. A good number of villa wells here were never registered. That is not free water. It is an unresolved liability that transfers with the house, so the status of the well belongs on the checklist at purchase, next to the title and the building permit.
Which one you have is a plot question, not an area question
Two villas on the same lane can be supplied differently, because one was built before the pipe arrived and the other after. So there is no useful map of this, and anyone who tells you what your area has is guessing. If you bought off plan, the handover file should state the supply, the tank capacity and the pump model. If you bought a resale, someone has to go and look, which takes about ten minutes and is worth doing before you ever need the answer at speed.
The equipment
Why a villa here stores its own water.
Even on mains, the incoming pipe rarely delivers enough pressure to run a rain shower on an upper floor while a washing machine is filling. So the supply fills a tank, and a pump takes it from there. That arrangement is normal on this island, and it is the part owners have never had to think about before.
The tank buys you hours, not weeks
A villa tank here is commonly sized for somewhere between a few hours and a day or two of use, and it is the occupancy that decides which. A couple in a large house can go a weekend on what eight guests will finish before dinner. That is the fact the rest of this page rests on: the reserve is short, so the real subject is the level and the point at which somebody reorders, not the size of the cylinder. The tank fills quietly through a float valve, often mostly at night when the network is less loaded, and as long as it has water the house behaves normally and nobody learns anything about the supply. That is exactly why an empty tank arrives as a total surprise rather than as a warning.
The pump makes the pressure
A pressure pump sits after the tank with a small pressure vessel and a switch. Open a tap, pressure falls, the switch starts the pump; close it, pressure rises, the pump stops. That switch and that vessel are the pressure at your shower head, not the mains. If the upper floor is weak, the answer is not a second pump in series behind the first, because the first one already is the booster. It is a pump sized for the highest and furthest outlet in the house, or a variable speed unit that holds a constant pressure whatever else is drawing at the same time. On very large houses it is different again: a tank at high level with a transfer pump filling it, and gravity doing the distribution. A guest complaining about a weak shower is nearly always describing one of these parts rather than the shower head they are standing under.
Three kinds of tank, three ways they fail
Buried concrete, common on older villas: cool, invisible, and when it cracks the water leaves into the soil with nothing above ground looking wrong. Opaque polyethylene above ground, the standard on newer houses: easy to inspect, but it takes sun and heat all day and its outlet fittings are where it gives up. Stainless steel above ground, which is everywhere here: look at the welds around the base and at the outlet boss, because that is where they start to weep, and chlorides from brackish water or from over chlorination attack the steel from the inside. Whichever you have, the access hatch needs to open without three people and a crowbar, because otherwise nobody will ever look in it.
Nothing here has a backup unless somebody bought one
One tank, one pump, one float valve, and no redundancy anywhere. In a hotel there is a second pump on standby. In a villa the second pump is whatever a technician can find on a Sunday, in the size that happens to be in stock. A spare pump on a shelf in the plant room costs little, and it is the part nobody can find on a Sunday. Very few houses have one until they have already had the bad night.
The plant room tells you how the house was built
Labelled valves, an isolator for each line, a floor that drains, and a light that works: that is a plant room somebody thought about. Unlabelled pipework in a locked cupboard behind the pool equipment is the other kind, and it costs an hour of a technician’s time every single visit before any work begins. Labelling it is a morning of work and it never has to be done again. We do it on houses we take over, because we are the ones who pay for the confusion otherwise.
The bad night
When the tank empties with guests inside.
Everyone meets this failure eventually. It rarely arrives slowly, and it almost never arrives at a convenient hour.
What the guests experience
The shower weakens, then spits, then runs to air. Taps cough. A toilet fills once and then does not refill, which is the detail that turns an inconvenience into an emergency with six people in the house. Guests message to say the water is broken, and they are not wrong. From their side there is no difference between an empty tank and a burst main.
What it does to the pump
A pressure pump run dry has nothing cooling or lubricating its mechanical seal, and it can wreck that seal in minutes rather than hours. Most pumps sold here do carry some protection, thermal at least and often a dry run cut out as well, but it is routinely switched out, wrongly set or bypassed after a repair, and even working it protects the motor rather than the seal that has already cooked. What you actually hear is not a pump cycling normally: it is a pump running and running without ever reaching its cut out pressure, because there is no water to make pressure with, getting hot, and then dropping out and restarting every few minutes on its thermal trip. So the first instruction to anyone at the house, before any diagnosis at all, is to switch the pump off at the isolator. Getting that one message out early is often the difference between a delivery and a delivery plus a new pump.
The tank rarely empties because people used too much
It is usually a toilet passing water silently into the pan, a float valve that has stuck closed so the tank never refilled, a garden line left open, a pool auto fill drawing from the same tank, a mains cut nobody noticed, or a delivery that was ordered late. Guest consumption is real, and a full villa does use noticeably more than an owner’s family, but on its own it is seldom the whole story. This matters because the fix is different in every case, and refilling the tank without finding the cause simply schedules the same night again.
The order of operations at eleven at night
Pump off at the isolator, first, before any diagnosis and before any phone call. Then close the pool auto fill, so the pool does not drink the delivery the moment it lands. Then the garden line. Then tell the house what is happening and steer what is left towards toilets and hand basins rather than showers, because a house with no flushing toilet is a different problem from a house with no shower. Only then start calling for a truck, and treat a night delivery as a possibility rather than a plan: not every supplier runs after dark, several lanes on this island are no place to reverse a tanker at night, and a driveway that is tight in daylight is worse by torchlight. If nothing will come before morning, the job for the rest of the night is making the remaining water last, which is a conversation with the guests rather than a plumbing task.
How it is actually prevented
A level that somebody reads and writes down, a floor below which the tank is never allowed to sit, and a standing delivery arrangement rather than a call made in a panic. Where it is worth it, a level sensor with an alarm removes the human from the loop entirely. It is a small piece of equipment, and it does the one job nobody can do reliably from another country. We also keep more than one tanker supplier’s number, because the good one is busy in exactly the weeks you need it.
Keeping it working
The tank, and how often it really needs attention.
Nothing here is complicated. It is simply work that has no deadline, which is why it is the first thing to be skipped on a house nobody is watching.
Cleaning it out, and why it is not optional here
Two things make stored water different from the water that went into the pipe. Mains water arrives carrying a chlorine residual, and that residual is gone within about a day in a tank open to atmosphere. And water held above ground in this climate sits warm, warmer than anything a European plumber ever designs for. Lose the disinfectant, hold the temperature, and biology restarts: sediment settles and a biofilm builds on the walls, faster than owners expect. So the tank gets drained, scrubbed, rinsed and refilled, which takes the house offline for the better part of a day. Common practice is once or twice a year depending on the supply, and trucked or borehole water needs it more often than mains. Book it in low season with nothing on the calendar, because doing it between two guest stays is how it ends up postponed for two years.
The lid, the vent and the overflow, and the real reason they are screened
A tank is only as clean as its opening. A lid that no longer seals lets in insects, geckos, leaves and rainwater running off a dirty slab. But the reason every opening on a water tank in Thailand should carry an intact insect screen is not the gecko. It is the mosquito. Aedes breeds in precisely this: clean, still water in a covered container beside a house, and it is the vector for dengue, which is a live and permanent public health matter on this island and the subject of local inspection campaigns. Lid, vent and overflow, all three, for that one reason. They are small parts and they are checked by lifting the lid and looking, which is the entire method.
The float valve, small part, large consequences
It is the cheapest component in the system and it causes both of the expensive outcomes. Stuck open, the tank overflows continuously and you discover it on a bill. Stuck closed, the tank never refills and you discover it through guests. Every service should include moving it by hand to confirm it still travels freely and seats properly, which takes seconds.
What a buried tank hides
A cracked underground tank loses water into the ground with no wet patch, no noise and no visible sign, and on a metered supply it appears only as consumption that will not explain itself. The way to find it is to isolate the tank inlet so the float valve cannot make the loss up, mark the level, and come back later to see whether it has fallen with the house shut. That test settles the argument about a mysterious bill in one visit, and it is the same test as the second half of the meter test further down this page.
The plant room log, and what belongs on it
Tank cleaned, filter changed, float valve replaced, each with a date. Then the things nobody can look up at speed on a Sunday: the pump make and model, the rating printed on its run capacitor, the cut in and cut out pressures the switch is set to, the pre charge the pressure vessel wants, the tank capacity, the filter cartridge size, and a hand drawn map of which valve isolates what. One sheet in a plastic sleeve on the plant room wall does it. Without that record the next technician, or the next manager, starts from nothing and either repeats the work or skips it. It also gives you a real service history for the day you sell, which is one of the few pieces of paperwork a buyer actually reads.
The pump
Where it fails, and what the noise is telling you.
Pumps almost never fail without warning. They fail after weeks of saying something to anybody standing in the plant room with the door shut and the house quiet.
The mechanical seal, first to go
The seal sits where the shaft enters the pump body, and its end is a slow weep that leaves a damp ring under the unit, then a rust stain running off the bolts and the bracket as the water finds steel. On the soft, slightly acidic water most of this island runs on there is no white crust to warn you, so the thing to look for is the wet ring and the corrosion, not a chalky deposit. Left alone, water reaches the motor bearing and then you are replacing a pump rather than a part. A wet plant room floor is therefore not a mess to be mopped, it is a reading. This is what to look for on a weekly round.
Rapid cycling, and the pressure vessel
If a conventional pump starts and stops several times while one tap runs steadily, the small pressure vessel has lost its air charge. The pump then does many times the number of starts it was designed for, which destroys the pressure switch and then the motor. Recharging or replacing the vessel is a minor job. Ignoring the noise for a season is a pump, and usually on the day the house is full. On a variable speed pump the fault does not sound the same, because the unit ramps instead of switching: there the sign is a pump that will not settle at a steady speed under a steady draw, and the diagnosis moves to the sensor and the electronics rather than to the vessel.
It hums but will not start
That is usually the run capacitor, a component the size of a shot glass that costs very little and can be carried as a spare. A technician who knows the house will have the right one in the van. One who has never seen the house will diagnose it, leave, return the next day, and in the meantime your guests have no water. That gap is the argument for knowing the pump model before anything goes wrong.
The pressure switch, and what replaced it on newer pumps
On a pump with a mechanical pressure switch, still the majority of what is fitted to villas here, the contacts pit and stick over time, so the pump either refuses to start or refuses to stop. A pump that will not stop heats up and eventually trips the breaker, which reads to everyone in the house as an electrical fault rather than a water one. Switches are consumable and cheap, and treating them as consumable rather than waiting for failure is the difference between a service and a call out. A growing share of houses now run variable speed pumps with a flow and pressure sensor instead. There is no switch to wear out, which is the sales argument, but the wear simply moves to the sensor and the control board, and those are not parts anybody carries in a van on a Sunday. Know which kind is in your plant room before the day it matters.
Replace before the season, not during it
A pump that has been running hard for years, weeping at the seal and cycling badly, is telling you what it intends to do in December. Changing it in the quiet months costs a scheduled job at a normal price with the house empty. Changing it in high season costs an emergency, a night of complaints and whatever unit is available rather than the right one. We would rather have that conversation with an owner in May, and we accept that it sounds like we are proposing to spend money on something that still works.
Quality
Filtration, iron, salt, and the water people actually drink.
Getting water to the tap is one problem. What is in it is a different one, and it decides how long every appliance in the house lasts. It also decides which treatment is worth buying, and this is where owners are most often sold the wrong box.
Sediment comes first, always
A sediment filter after the pump catches sand and grit before it reaches taps, valves, heaters and the seals inside them. Trucked and borehole supplies carry more of it than mains, and a filter doing its job will visibly load up. Changing the cartridge is a scheduled item with a date written on the housing, not something done when somebody notices poor pressure. Leave one in far too long and three things follow, in this order. The pressure drop across it climbs until the instant heaters downstream stop firing, which is how a filter nobody thought about becomes a bathroom complaint. The matter held in the cartridge becomes its own small ecosystem in a warm plant room. And at a high enough differential the element channels or splits and releases everything it was holding into the line at once.
Iron and manganese, the real local nuisance
This island is granite, and the mains supply comes off surface reservoirs sitting on it, so the water arriving at most houses is soft and slightly acidic rather than hard. The limestone country is across the bay, not here, which is why a European plumber’s instinct about scale misleads on Phuket. What the ground here does give up, particularly to boreholes, is iron and manganese: rust coloured staining in basins and on white sanitaryware, grey to black marks from the manganese, laundry that comes out of the machine worse than it went in, and a metallic taste. Housekeeping cannot scrub this out however hard it tries, and guests read those marks as a dirty house. The treatment is oxidation and filtration, sized to a test, and it is not a softener.
Low pH, corrosion, and salt near the coast
Slightly acidic water is kind to a kettle and hard on everything metal it touches: brass fittings, copper tails, the steel in a tank, the element in a heater. Blue green staining under a fitting, or a joint that seeps for no visible reason, is usually this rather than bad workmanship, and the answer is pH correction upstream rather than another new fitting. Close to the sea there is a second problem: a well can draw brackish water, and chloride quietly attacks fittings, stainless tanks and heater elements while it kills the planting on any garden line fed from the same source. Salinity is not something a cartridge filter removes. It is reverse osmosis, or blending with another source, or a different source altogether.
Hardness, and the softener that is usually the wrong answer
Hardness does exist here, mostly on coastal boreholes where the calcium and magnesium arrive with seawater intrusion rather than out of any limestone. Where a laboratory test shows genuine hardness, a softener is the right equipment and it will save the heater elements, the shower heads and the glass. Where a test shows something else, it is expensive and wrong. A softener does nothing about salinity: it swaps calcium and magnesium for sodium, leaves the chlorides where they were, and hands you water that is more corrosive than before, not less. Put one in front of ferrous water and the iron fouls and destroys the resin within months. So the test comes first. It costs little, it ends the guesswork permanently, and it tells you whether the treatment somebody wants to sell you is the treatment your water needs.
Nobody drinks from the tap, and guests need telling
Whatever the supply, tap water in a villa here is not treated as drinking water. Provide it properly: bottled water on arrival, or a filtered dispenser that somebody maintains and that has a date on its cartridge. Then say so in the house manual and in the welcome message, in plain words. A guest who assumes otherwise is a problem the owner ends up carrying.
Where the filters live matters
Housings need to be reachable, in the light, with room to unscrew the bowl and a bucket underneath. Filters installed behind a fixed panel or under a garden slab get changed once, by the person who fitted them, and then never again. This is a small design point at build stage and an annoying one to fix later, but it decides whether the maintenance actually happens for the next ten years.
Hot water
Heaters fail for water reasons more often than electrical ones.
Almost every complaint about hot water in a villa here turns out to be about pressure, flow, or a schedule somebody set once. The heater is usually the victim rather than the culprit.
Instant heaters need flow, not just power
Bathrooms here usually have their own instant heater, and those units will not fire below a minimum flow. When the pump is weak, the pressure vessel is flat or the sediment filter is blocked, the heater simply stops heating. The guest reports a broken water heater, a technician replaces a heater that was never faulty, and the same complaint arrives from the next bathroom a week later. Check the water side before the appliance, every time.
Storage cylinders, recovery time, and the setting nobody thinks about
Larger villas often use a central cylinder, sometimes with solar collectors on the roof. A cylinder sized for a couple empties in a morning when eight guests shower in sequence, which is a sizing problem rather than a fault, but it reads as a fault in a review. Timers matter too: a cylinder set to heat on a schedule that suited the owner will not suit a house full of people on holiday, so check it before a large booking rather than after. And the temperature setting is a health question before it is an energy one. A cylinder turned down to save electricity, in a house that then stands empty for weeks in this climate, is the textbook condition for legionella to establish itself in the store and in the dead legs of pipework. Keep the store properly hot, run it hot through every outlet after a long empty spell before anybody arrives, and if scalding is the worry then solve that with a blending valve at the outlet rather than with a low setting at the cylinder.
What actually kills a heater here
Not limescale, in most houses on this island. The elements that fail early here mostly fail from sediment settling on them, from corrosion in soft acidic water, or from being asked to work at the wrong flow for years. Scale is real where the water is genuinely hard, which is a minority of supplies and nearly always a borehole, and there it furs the element, makes it work harder and finishes it early, and does the same inside solar collectors and their pipework. Which of those is killing your heaters is a question one water test answers. That is the practical reason to test rather than an abstract one: the cost shows up as a run of dead heaters two or three years later, and by then nobody connects the two.
Wet rooms, the ELCB on the heater, and the earth underneath it
An instant heater sits in the wettest room in the house, and nearly every unit sold here has its own earth leakage breaker built into it, with a test button on the front panel. That is the button somebody should actually press, on a schedule, and write down that it worked. It is not the same device as the residual current breaker in the consumer unit, and a house can have one and not the other. The larger question sits underneath both: the earth itself, which in older villas here is often absent, corroded, or connected to something that is not an electrode. A heater that trips repeatedly in a house with a sound earth is an appliance reporting a fault. The same symptom in a house with no real earth is a different and more serious conversation, and it is not solved by resetting anything.
High season
Cuts, queues, and what to keep on the shelf.
Supply problems cluster in the dry months, which are also the months the house is full. That is not bad luck, it is the same cause producing both.
Mains cuts arrive without notice
Network repairs, a burst somewhere upstream or simple demand can drop the pressure or stop it entirely, and the villa highest up the hill or furthest along a branch loses it first and gets it back last. With a healthy tank the house never notices. With a tank that was already low, the cut is what finishes it. This is the argument for a level floor you never go below, rather than for a bigger tank.
A tanker is a queue in the busy months
Everyone wants water in the same weeks, and a supplier who comes the same afternoon in June may quote two days in February. Standing orders, ordering at a level rather than at a crisis, and a relationship with more than one supplier are what make the difference. None of that is clever. It just has to be somebody’s job.
A power cut is also a water cut
A full tank delivers nothing without the pump, so any outage is a water outage for the whole house. If there is a generator or an inverter, check which circuits it actually carries, because plant rooms are often left off. Owners are consistently surprised by this, and it is a five minute thing to verify on a calm day.
What to keep in the plant room
A spare float valve, a spare pressure switch, a capacitor for the pump model that is actually fitted, filter cartridges, and thread tape and fittings. Where the house is busy through high season, a complete spare pump as well. Every item on that list is inexpensive next to one night of no water in a full villa, and each one turns a two day problem into a two hour one.
Tell guests, and use the warning yourself
When a cut is known about in advance, a short message to the house saying what is happening and when it should return changes the experience completely. Guests forgive an interruption they were warned about and remember one that ambushed them at six in the morning. The warning is worth something on your side of the wall too: top the tank up before the cut rather than during it, close the pool auto fill so the pool is not drawing on a tank that cannot refill, and hold the laundry. The house manual should also say plainly where the water comes from and that the tap water is not for drinking.
Leaks
Finding it before the bill finds you.
A leak in a Phuket villa is rarely dramatic. It is a slow loss that nobody can hear, running for weeks in a house with nobody in it.
The meter test, and the condition that makes it mean anything
This is the test most people get wrong, and the reason is the tank. On a villa the meter sits upstream of the tank, not between the tank and your taps, so it turns every time the float valve opens to refill: after a normal evening, after a cut, after a delivery. A meter moving in an empty house is the system working, as often as not. So set the condition before reading anything: tank full, float valve checked by hand and confirmed closed, nothing filling. Then there are two tests, and they find different faults. First, with the house shut and the tank full, the meter should not move at all; if it does, either the incoming line between the meter and the float valve is losing water, or the tank level is dropping and the float has reopened to make it up, which is what the second test separates. Second, close the tank inlet, mark the level, and come back later: if the level has fallen with every tap closed, the loss is downstream of the tank, in the house pipework, the pump, the garden line or the pool fill, or the tank itself is cracked. Both cost nothing and need no tools. Both are worth more when the reading is written next to the last one, because a single figure has nothing to be compared with and a year of them makes an unusual month visible the week it starts instead of the month the bill arrives.
The toilet is the usual suspect
A flush valve that no longer seats passes water into the pan continuously and silently, and it will do that for months. The test is to put a little colouring in the cistern and come back in half an hour to see whether it has reached the pan. The part costs almost nothing and takes minutes to change. It is the first thing we look for when a bill rises with no explanation, and it is usually what we find.
The bidet shower nobody checks
Every bathroom in this country has a hand held bidet shower beside the toilet, and it is the most ignored fitting in the house. The trigger seals on a rubber seat that hardens with age, the hose splits where it kinks behind the pan, and the small stop valve on the wall weeps at its stem. All three drain straight into the pan or down the wall behind it, where nobody looks, and none of them announce themselves. The check is to close the trigger, watch the head for half a minute, run a dry hand along the hose and around the stop valve, and look at the floor behind the pan. It takes seconds per bathroom, and every bathroom is walked anyway at each guest turnover, so there is no honest reason for it not to be on that list.
The buried supply line
A pipe leaking underground shows itself as a patch of garden that is greener than the rest, a slab that never quite dries, or a pump that starts on its own in a house where no tap is open. That last symptom is conclusive and easy to observe: stand in the plant room, keep quiet, and wait. Repair means finding the line and opening the ground, so the value is entirely in catching it early.
The pool confuses the picture
Pools lose water to evaporation every day, and under this sun that is millimetres a day off an uncovered pool, which is easily enough on its own to look like a leak. A pool with an automatic top up then hides its own losses by drinking from the same supply as the house. So if consumption has risen with no explanation, isolate the pool top up and do the bucket test, rather than simply marking the waterline and coming back. Stand a bucket of pool water on a step so it sits at the same temperature and in the same air, mark the level inside the bucket and the level of the pool outside it, leave the filtration running as normal and the auto fill off, and compare both marks a day later. If the pool has dropped further than the bucket, that difference is the leak. If both dropped by the same amount, it is evaporation and the shell is fine. In the wet months rain lands in both and the test is not usable, so it wants a settled run of days.
The routine
What a manager checks weekly, and what you should see.
None of this is specialist work. It is a fixed short list done in the same order every week, and then written down in a form you can actually read from another country.
Every week, on the house
Tank level noted as a number rather than as a glance, the float valve moved by hand and confirmed seated, the meter read under the condition that makes a reading mean something, the plant room floor checked for damp and for rust off the pump bracket, the pump listened to with one tap cracked open, and water run clear at a tap. On an empty house, the meter is read twice in the same visit. It takes a few minutes once the route is fixed, and it catches almost everything described above while it is still cheap.
At every guest turnover
Run every tap and shower, flush every toilet, check every bidet shower and its stop valve, and confirm hot water in each bathroom rather than in one. Check the tank level against the size of the party arriving, because a family of eight for a week is a different demand from a couple for two nights. If the level is marginal, the delivery happens before check in, not after the first complaint. This is the check that keeps the bad night from happening in the first place.
Monthly and seasonal
Filter cartridges on their date, isolation valves exercised so they still turn when somebody needs them urgently, pressure vessel checked, the heater test buttons pressed, and the tank inspected inside. Before high season, the pump gets a proper service and any part that has been complaining gets replaced while the house is quiet. After the wet months, the tank lid, the vent and the overflow screens get looked at again, because that is when they tear and that is when the mosquitoes are looking for exactly this.
What should be in the report you receive
The meter reading with the previous one beside it, and the condition it was taken under. The tank level, or the date of the last delivery. Any part replaced, with a photograph and what it cost. Filter and tank cleaning dates. And anything found but not yet fixed, with a recommendation, so you are deciding rather than being told afterwards.
What a report that says nothing looks like
A line reading “water checked, all OK” is not a check, it is a sentence. It cannot be verified, it cannot be compared with last month, and it is identical whether somebody read the meter or drove past the gate. Ask your manager for the numbers. A manager who is doing the work will find that request completely unremarkable.
Straight answers
What owners ask us about water.
Can guests drink the water from the taps?
How often should the tank be cleaned?
My bill jumped and nothing changed. What happened?
Is a borehole cheaper than mains water?
The pump keeps starting and stopping. Is that normal?
Who orders the water truck, me or the manager?
Reviewed . We update these pages when the practice on the ground changes, not on a schedule.
Where to go next
Our services
- Villa management in Phuket
- Condo management in Phuket
- Airbnb management in Phuket
- All property management services
- Villa care for absentee owners in Phuket
- Rent out my villa in Phuket
- A second opinion on how your villa is being managed
- Villa maintenance and housekeeping in Phuket
- Home property management in Phuket
- About Phuket Property Manager
- Contact a property management company in Phuket
Guides for owners
- Employing villa staff in Phuket
- Off-plan villa handover in Phuket: the snagging inspection
- How to choose a property management company in Phuket
- Self-managing versus hiring a property manager in Phuket
- Short-term rental rules in Phuket: the 30-day question
- Your rental guarantee is ending. What now?
- Switching property manager in Phuket
- Property management fees in Phuket
- The true cost of running a villa in Phuket
- Property management in Phuket for foreign owners
- Mould and humidity in an empty villa in Phuket
- Salt corrosion in a coastal villa in Phuket
- Villa air conditioning in Phuket: servicing, faults and who pays
- Villa pool maintenance in the Phuket rainy season
Talk to the person who would look after your property.
No call centre, no sales team. We keep the portfolio small on purpose.