I’m in Phnom Penh for the first time in three years and sorting things out before we move here permanently next year.

We have a four bedroom Borey unit. We have a water tank on the roof, but still no water pressure to the showers in the bedrooms on the second and third floor. Pressure is fine on the ground floor. Is the best option to buy water heaters with pumps for each shower or could we install a pump connected to the tank that solve the problem in all the bedrooms?

As to drinking water, when I was here before, we would get a five gallon bottle with a spigot for about a buck. My in-laws tell me that water isn’t reliable anymore. Does anyone have a reliable source or another solution? In Malaysia we have cooler and get it delivered for about $2.50 a bottle.

Thanks in advance.

We use a National ceramic drip filter, bought at Aeon for $30 or so. Change the filters every few months. Tap > filter > fridge. Any water for cooking also comes straight from the tap.
The $1 20L barrels are fine, though a pain to lug about. There are some fairly unhygenic operators out there. Eurotec seems fine. Hitech less so.

Put a padlock on your water pump else it will go walkabout.

My water pressure (E5) was fine five years ago but got increasingly weak/unreliable until I was forced to install a roof tank rather than not knowing whether or not anything would happen when I turned a tap on.

But with the tank installed and less than a 1m drop, the pressure was pathetically weak, so I bought a small inline pump which kicks in automatically when you turn on a tap.

It's just a small one similar to this:

John Bingham wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 4:05 pm I had very poor water pressure for a while so we had a larger pump than the one above installed downstairs. It broke and so did the next one. The one I have now is bigger again and works well but it screams. It doesn't bother me though as it's quite far away.

Because the pump only had to assist gravity as opposed to pushing it uphill, I didn't think I needed a bigger one. I got visions of Kramer with his elephant bath showerhead.

Too many bad blue bottles over the last year so I resorted to my own water filter. It is a 7 pass RO system, 3 main particulate filters, the RO (reverse osmosis) membrane, and then 2 polish filters and a UV section too. Was about $300 if I remember correctly.

Then for good measure I just boil everything and store it in my own blue 20L bottles (I have about 5). That way I leave nothing to chance.

My view is that I drink water every day, I don't want to chance anything anymore.

I’ve been skeptical about these blue water bottles ever since I swung by one of these ‘drinking water’ distribution places, when I looked inside there was 3 or 4 young kids pouring the dregs from the returned blue bottles, into another blue bottle which no doubt would be cellophane wrapped and sold to some unsuspecting mug.
I only drink water from the single use half and one liter bottles, I know it’s not very eco friendly, but the water itself is risky enough without it coming from a possibly unclean container.

I used to just run tap water through a three stage filter and had no issues, but after I installed the roof tank the water is sitting up there percolating at up to 38C during the day, perfect for bacteria, so now I fill a 10L bottle via the filter and then bubble ozone through it for 30 mins.