Borehole Drilling
Brooklyn

Brooklyn sits on Pretoria Group shale in the old established belt south-east of the city centre, with the ridge ground rising to the south.

The demand here is driven by large mature gardens, and the constraint is usually getting a rig past the trees and the walls to reach them.

What Is Under Brooklyn

Formation	Where it sits	What it means for drilling
Silverton Formation shale	The broad valley ground between the northern and eastern quartzite ridges	The thickest shale unit in the Pretoria Group and the rock under most of these suburbs. It drills quickly but is a weak aquifer in itself; yield depends on fracturing rather than on the rock mass.
Diabase dykes and sills	Cutting across the shale throughout the Pretoria valley	Often the best target on this ground. Fractures concentrate along the contact between an intrusion and the shale it cuts, and that is where useful yields are usually found.
Weathered shale and residual clay	The upper section on most stands	Soft and often swelling. It has to be cased through to competent rock before the hole will stand open.

What That Means for Your Borehole

• Dyke contacts are the targets worth locating and they are exactly what a survey is looking for on this ground.
• Drilling is comparatively quick so the per-metre rate tends to sit at the lower end of the range.
• Yields here are usually modest but workable which is well suited to irrigation with storage rather than to high continuous draw.

Where We Work Around Brooklyn

• Brooklyn and the streets around Brooklyn Circle
• Nieuw Muckleneuk boundary
• Hazelwood and Waterkloof approaches
• Menlo Park side
• Embassy and consular properties
• Schools and institutional grounds
• Larger established stands

What to Watch For Here

Mature trees are the recurring access problem. Brooklyn's established planting is exactly what makes a borehole worth having and exactly what makes the rig's job difficult. Overhead canopy, root protection zones and narrow walled driveways all restrict where a truck-mounted rig can set up.

Heritage and streetscape considerations arise on some stands. Older properties in this part of the city occasionally carry conditions relating to alterations and site works. It is worth checking before committing to a position, particularly where trenching would cross an established garden.

What the Water Is Used For

• Watering lawns and beds through the driest months of the year
• Pool top-up, once the water has been tested for it
• Standby supply when the municipal mains go down
• Sports turf and institutional landscaping
• Cutting the volume bought from the metro each month

Wellpoint or Borehole?

Not an option. The residual clay over the shale is not the unconsolidated, permeable material a driven point needs, and the water table sits well below suction range. A drilled borehole is the route to groundwater here.

Registration and Abstraction

A completed borehole here should be registered with the City of Tshwane, and the responsibility for that sits with the property owner rather than with the driller. Separately, the National Water Act governs how much you may abstract: reasonable domestic use and small-scale gardening generally fall under Schedule 1, while larger, agricultural or commercial abstraction may require registration or a water use authorisation from the Department of Water and Sanitation. The position on domestic registration was being actively revised during 2026, so confirm your obligations before drilling rather than afterwards.

Related Services

For the drilling process itself, the geology across the wider metro and how a quote is put together, see Borehole Drilling Pretoria.

Borehole Prices in This Area

Drilling is charged per metre, so depth drives the total. The ranges below are framed for local ground conditions and access.

Item	Indicative range	What moves it locally
Drilling, per metre	R450 - R1,000 /m	Shale drills faster than the quartzite and dolomite elsewhere in the metro, which usually keeps the per-metre rate lower.
uPVC casing, installed, per metre	R400 - R700 /m	Diameter and class. The weathered clay horizon over the shale governs how much is needed.
Mobilisation and site establishment	R2,500 - R9,000	Access and site conditions move this; a site visit settles it before quoting.
Water survey	R5,000 - R12,000	Targets structure rather than depth. Worth most where yield is fracture-dependent.
Yield testing	R3,500 - R15,000	Establishes the sustainable rate that pump selection depends on.
Pump, supplied and installed	R15,000 - R45,000	Greater depth means more head, which means a larger pump and heavier cable.
Storage and booster	R12,000 - R35,000	Needed wherever peak demand exceeds the borehole's sustainable rate.
Typical complete project	R70,000 - R200,000+	Everything above, excluding treatment, which depends entirely on the water analysis.

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