Borehole Drilling
Sunnyside

Sunnyside sits on Pretoria Group shale close to the city centre, on some of the most densely built ground in the metro.

Here the binding constraint is almost never the geology; it is finding a position a rig can reach and work in.

What Is Under Sunnyside

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	Clay-rich and unstable. Casing through to sound rock is a requirement, not a refinement.

What That Means for Your Borehole

• Siting is about finding structure, not depth because the shale itself carries little water between fractures.
• 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 Sunnyside

• Sunnyside flats and apartment blocks
• Older residential stands
• Arcadia and Muckleneuk boundaries
• Trevenna and Pretoria CBD approaches
• Institutional and student accommodation properties
• Body corporate and sectional-title schemes
• Small commercial premises

What to Watch For Here

Access is the whole problem in Sunnyside. High-density flats, small stands, on-street parking and limited yard space rule out most positions before geology is even considered. A truck-mounted rig needs a route, a working area and overhead clearance, and on many Sunnyside properties there is simply nowhere that satisfies all three.

Dense underground services need locating first. Inner-city ground carries water, sewer, electrical and telecommunications lines at shallow depth, often poorly recorded. Service location is a necessary first step rather than a precaution, and it sometimes eliminates the only otherwise viable position.

What the Water Is Used For

• Continuity cover during water interruptions
• Communal supply for apartment blocks and body corporate schemes
• Lowering a water bill driven mostly by outdoor use
• Estate common property and verge irrigation
• Wash-down and general non-potable use

Wellpoint or Borehole?

No. Wellpoints need loose sand and a water table within roughly seven metres, and neither is present on the valley shale. Groundwater here is reached by drilling.

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	Softer rock means faster progress, so holes here generally sit at the lower end of the metro-wide range.
uPVC casing, installed, per metre	R400 - R700 /m	Set by diameter and class, with the quantity determined by the depth of the clay-rich weathered zone above the shale.
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.

Sunnyside Borehole FAQs

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