Low water pressure in the house: finding the cause

Test before you buy anything. Open the kitchen tap, the shower and the outside tap nearest the meter, one at a time.

Ask a neighbour too. On a house with a roof tank or a pump, the supply and the taps are separated, so test the tank's filling and the taps' flow as two different questions.

A clogged aerator is the usual cause, and it costs nothing to check. Unscrew the small screen at the spout, rinse the grit and any white crust out, and screw it back. Hard water deposits build up here: see hard water.

Shower heads block the same way. If it is an electric shower head, put the breaker off before touching anything, and leave wiring to an electrician. Our electric shower stack explains more.

If the screen is clean, follow the pipe back to the small valve under the basin or behind the toilet. One that has been knocked part-closed or has seized will choke that tap alone.

Yes, and it happens more often than people expect, especially after repair work. A gate valve on your house's main line, part closed, weakens every tap.

Find your own valve, turn it gently anticlockwise until it stops, and test again. If it is stiff, do not force it: old gate valves can break or start leaking. That is a plumber's job.

If the house has a pressure-reducing valve near the meter, a failed one can also leave every tap weak, and a plumber can test it.

Your side only. The street side of the meter belongs to the National Water Commission (NWC), so leave it alone, along with every street valve.

Check NWC's advisories by parish, then ask next door. If the whole road is weak at the same hours, your pipes are unlikely to be the cause.

Pressure is also managed on purpose. The non-revenue water page reports 146 pressure zones in Kingston and St Andrew as at April 2021. Too little pressure "frustrates customers", it says, while too much harms the pipes. We found no published pressure figure for any zone, nor a minimum you are promised. Dated background for the Corporate Area is in our Kingston stack. If water is off altogether, go to lock-off steps.

Water has to climb, and each metre of hill or building takes pressure away from the street supply. Houses at the top of a road, or the upper floor of a house, feel it first, and it can get worse at busy times when neighbours draw water too.

There is little you can do to the street from your side. The usual fix is to stop relying on street pressure at the tap: let supply fill a tank at or near ground level, however slowly, then push from there. Our roof or ground stack compares the positions. A roof tank that never fills is often the first sign.

Yes. Old galvanised steel pipes can rust from inside until the bore narrows, and the water loses flow as a result. Brown water at the start of a draw is a further clue: NWC's FAQ lists "the age of the pipes on the premises" among the causes of discolouration.

You cannot clear this from a tap. A plumber can open a joint and look, then quote for replacing the worst runs or the main line. Get the price in J$, dated and in writing. Near the sea, read our salt air stack before choosing the new material, and take the questions from our hiring stack.

Once your own taps, valves and neighbours point to the supply, and it is lasting. Write down dates and times, and which taps you tested. A screw-on gauge at the outside tap gives you numbers, though the NWC pages we read give no standard to compare them with.

Complain in writing, since standard WGS4 only runs on a written complaint: acknowledgement within 5 working days, then investigation or an update within 30. The FAQ's ladder runs from front-line staff to Customer Service or the Area Manager, the Community Relations Manager or Head Office, then the Office of Utilities Regulation. Water spraying at the meter or in the road belongs on the leak report page.

A pump works only with a tank in front of it, because it can only push water it has. A pump on a weak supply just empties the pipe. Official wording on this covers rain systems only: the 2023 guideline keeps their pumps off the public main. The tank-first layout is still the sensible one everywhere.

So the job is a storage tank, a pump and a pressure tank, with wiring by an electrician. If you already have that set-up and pressure is weak, the fault may be in the precharge or pump: see our pump and pressure tank stack.