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PROJECT
Water and cost savings – all in one container
Compiled by
Megan O’ Connor, with technical input from Ground 2 Tap Water Solutions
In June 2025, Ground 2 Tap Water Solutions approached a hotel and wine estate in Brackenfell, Cape Town after identifying it as a strong candidate for both water security and financial savings, through innovative water solutions.
The project was completed at a large hotel and wine estate located in Brackenfell. The estate includes hospitality, accommodation, irrigation and operational facilities, all of which place significant demand on water reliability and quality.
The brief Before the project, the estate already had multiple boreholes on site being used primarily for irrigation, but the property was still heavily reliant on municipal water for its operational and potable water needs. The estate also had an existing water treatment plant on site. However, this system had not operated correctly for several years and was no longer fit for purpose.
After assessment, it became clear that refurbishing or repairing the existing plant would not deliver a reliable or compliant outcome. Ground 2 Tap’ s recommendation was therefore to mothball the existing system entirely and design a new, purpose-built treatment solution aligned with the estate’ s long-term operational needs.
The purpose Through the upgrade, the client hoped to achieve three things: 1. Financial savings: reducing municipal water consumption was a key driver, with a clear focus on lowering long-term operating costs.
2. Security of supply: with ongoing concerns around drought conditions in the Western Cape, the estate wanted to ensure continuity of water supply without reliance on municipal availability.
3. Long-term water quality and consistency: as a hospitality-driven environment, consistent, high-quality water was essential for guest experience, infrastructure protection and operational reliability.
Based on existing geohydrologist yield tests and water quality reports, the engineers confirmed that the estate’ s borehole infrastructure had sufficient capacity to support these goals – allowing them to design a solution that could take the estate fully off-grid from a water perspective.
The installation – from start to finish The entire project duration from concept to handover was around eight weeks – with the design and planning phase taking around six weeks, and on-site installation and commissioning taking around two weeks.
All images supplied by Ground 2 Tap
The project began with a detailed site inspection and system mapping phase – including reviewing existing site drawings, identifying the full pipe network across the estate, locating interchange and isolation valves, and understanding how water flowed between storage, treatment and distribution points. Also assessed were power availability, existing clean water storage and potential discharge points for backwash water. In this case, the system was designed so that all back-wash water could be reused for irrigation, meaning there was effectively no wastewater generated by the treatment process.
Once the concept was refined and approved, the project was handed from the proposals team to the engineering team. The system was fully engineered – including CAD layouts, detailed P & IDs and control logic schematics. The final design was a containerised water
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