About this site

Tanks and Taps Jamaica is a set of plain card stacks about house water and pipes in Jamaica: tanks, lock-offs, pumps, NWC bills, rainwater, cesspools and septic tanks, hot water, storms, scale and salt air. It is for people who own or look after a house. We are not plumbers or a contractor, and we do no installs or repairs.

What the stacks are based on

Government and utility documents first: the National Water Commission, the Water Resources Authority, NEPA, ODPEM, the municipal corporations and the Ministry's advice as carried by the Jamaica Information Service. Then WHO, PAHO and US agencies, labelled as outside sources, and makers' manuals, labelled as one maker's word. Newspapers and one law firm's article appear for points we had no official page for or as added context, and the card names them. Every card has its own source line. We have not visited houses, tested products or spoken to the offices named.

What we could not read

When we checked on 2 November 2026, moh.gov.jm and our.org.jm would not open for us, so we have not read the Ministry's and the Office of Utilities Regulation's own pages directly. We also found no Jamaican rule on electric shower heads, no parish table of water hardness, no size or distance rule for a house septic tank, no plumber's licence, and no list of who may empty a cesspool. Where those gaps touch a stack, the card says so instead of guessing. If you know the document we missed, take it to the office named on the card.

What we leave out

No repair prices, because we have no source for them. No reviews, no named readers and no people we cannot show you. Rates and fees carry the date we read them, because they change.

Who is behind it

The site is signed by its name and not by a person. Who owns it, and how its links work.

Pictures

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons. Jamaican houses and tanks are thin on the ground there, so some pictures come from other countries and the caption says so. Where we had no fitting photograph we used a realistic AI-generated picture, captioned as one. See the picture credits.