You bought a condo in Cabo. Maybe you chose it for the view, the pool, the location. Nobody mentioned the water system during the sale. Nobody explained that your water quality depends on a shared cistern you’ve never seen, maintained by an HOA board that may or may not prioritize it, funded by a budget that divides cost among owners who use wildly different amounts.
In a house, your water is your responsibility. In a condo, your water is a governance problem.
How Condo Water Works in Los Cabos
Most Cabo condos use a shared cistern system. One or more large cisterns (typically 20,000–100,000+ liters depending on building size) serve all units. A central pump system pushes water up to either a shared rooftop tank, individual tinacos per unit, or a pressurized distribution system. The shared cistern is filled by pipa delivery or municipal supply, managed by the HOA or property administration, and maintained — in theory — on a regular schedule.
Your water quality depends on three things you largely don’t control: the shared cistern’s condition, the HOA’s maintenance decisions, and the building’s plumbing infrastructure. The one thing you do control: your individual unit’s tinaco (if you have one) and any point-of-use filtration you install.
The Cabo Condo Landscape
The expat and vacation property market in Los Cabos is overwhelmingly condo-based. From the beachfront towers of Medano to the golf course developments of Cabo del Sol and Quivira, condos range from 10-unit boutique buildings to 200+ unit resort complexes. Each has a water system, and they vary enormously in design, capacity, and maintenance quality.
What they share: dependence on a shared water infrastructure that sits somewhere between “building amenity” and “critical utility” in the HOA’s attention hierarchy. The pool gets weekly maintenance. The elevators get monthly inspection. The cistern? It depends on who’s on the board.
The Three Condo Water Configurations
Not all condo buildings distribute water the same way. Understanding your building’s specific configuration tells you where your risks lie.
Configuration 1: Shared cistern → central pump → individual tinacos. The most common setup in low-to-mid-rise buildings (2–5 stories). The shared cistern sits in a basement or ground-level utility area. A pump pushes water up to the roof, where each unit has its own tinaco (typically 1,100L Rotoplas). The tinaco gravity-feeds the unit below. Your water quality depends on the shared cistern (HOA’s responsibility) AND your individual tinaco (your responsibility). Advantage: individual tinaco acts as a buffer — if the shared pump fails, you have a day’s worth of water. Disadvantage: your tinaco is another point of contamination that needs its own maintenance.
Configuration 2: Shared cistern → pressurized system → direct to units. Common in newer, higher-end buildings. Variable-speed pumps maintain constant pressure in the building’s riser pipes, delivering water directly to each unit without individual tinacos. The system uses a pressure tank or multiple pumps to maintain consistent flow. Advantage: no individual tinacos to maintain, newer infrastructure. Disadvantage: when the pump fails, nobody has water immediately; pressure varies by floor — higher floors get less pressure, which is why some penthouse owners install booster pumps.
Configuration 3: Shared cistern → shared rooftop tank → gravity feed. Common in older buildings. One large rooftop tank (or multiple tanks) serves all units. The pump fills the roof tank, and gravity feeds everyone below. Advantage: simplicity. Disadvantage: everyone’s water passes through the same rooftop tank — if it’s contaminated, all units are affected. Also, ground-floor units get significantly more pressure than top-floor units.
The HOA Problem: Your Water Is a Committee Decision
In a house, you decide when to clean your cistern. In a condo, the HOA decides — and that decision competes with every other maintenance priority: painting, landscaping, elevator repair, pool equipment, roof waterproofing, and whatever the loudest owner is complaining about this month.
Common governance problems:
No maintenance schedule. Many Cabo condo HOAs have no written cistern maintenance schedule. Cleaning happens reactively — when someone complains about water taste or a health scare triggers action. Proactive annual or biannual cleaning is the exception, not the norm.
Budget pressure. Professional cleaning of a large shared cistern (30,000L+) costs shared cistern cleaning cost, expected $5,000–15,000 MXN depending on size. Source: local service provider quotes. Update annually.. That’s a real line item in a small HOA budget. When the budget is tight, cistern cleaning is often the first thing deferred.
Absentee owners. In many Cabo condo buildings, 30–60% of units are owned by non-residents who vacation a few weeks per year. These owners vote on HOA budgets but rarely attend meetings, often prioritize keeping fees low (since they don’t live with the daily water quality), and may not understand the maintenance needs of the water system.
No transparency. Few HOAs share cistern inspection reports, water quality test results, or maintenance logs with unit owners. If you ask “when was the cistern last cleaned?” and get a vague answer, that’s a red flag.
What you can do: Request the HOA’s cistern maintenance records. Propose a standing agenda item for water system maintenance at annual meetings. Volunteer for or create a “utilities committee” that oversees water infrastructure. Push for annual cistern cleaning as a budget line item, not a discretionary expense. If your building has 20+ units, the per-unit cost of annual cleaning is typically per-unit cleaning cost, expected $250–750 MXN per unit annually. Source: total cost ÷ typical unit counts. Update annually. — less than a single restaurant dinner.
The Pressure Cascade: Why Your Floor Matters
In a multi-story condo, water pressure is not equal across floors. This is simple physics: gravity provides approximately 0.1 bar (1.4 PSI) of pressure for every meter of height between the water source and the tap.
In a gravity-fed system (tinaco or rooftop tank), the penthouse gets the least pressure (nearest to the tank) and the ground floor gets the most (farthest below the tank). In a 4-story building, the pressure difference between the top and bottom unit can be 30–40%.
This matters for two reasons:
Comfort and flow. Lower pressure means weaker showers, slower-filling bathtubs, and appliances (washing machines, dishwashers) that take longer to fill. Top-floor owners often notice this first.
Consumption cascade. Higher-pressure units consume more water per minute of use. A 5-minute shower on the ground floor uses more water than the same 5-minute shower in the penthouse. This means ground-floor units contribute disproportionately to water consumption — and thus to shared pipa delivery costs — even at the same usage duration.
In pressurized systems, the pump compensates for height, but top-floor units still tend to get slightly less consistent pressure, especially during peak usage times when multiple units draw simultaneously.
Who Pays for What (And Why It’s Contentious)
Water cost in a condo building is typically shared among all units as part of the HOA fee. This sounds fair until you consider the realities:
Unequal consumption. A permanently occupied family of four uses 5–10x more water than a studio unit occupied three weeks a year. A ground-floor restaurant or commercial space can use more than all residential units combined. Yet many HOAs split water costs equally by unit or by square footage — neither of which correlates with actual water use.
The fair approach: Individual water meters per unit, with shared costs (cistern maintenance, pump electricity, common area water use) distributed separately. In practice, most Cabo condos don’t have individual meters, and retrofitting them is expensive and disruptive. Some newer buildings include them by design.
The common approach: Water cost is bundled into the monthly HOA fee, distributed by unit fraction (based on property size or equal shares). This incentivizes overconsumption for large users and overcharges small users. If your building has a mix of full-time residents, vacation owners, and commercial tenants, this model is inherently unfair to low-use owners.
If your HOA doesn’t have individual metering, the most actionable change you can advocate for: a tiered HOA fee structure that accounts for unit size and occupancy type, with a water-specific reserve fund for cistern maintenance that isn’t subject to annual budget debates.
Your Unit Is Not Isolated From Your Neighbors
Here’s the systems insight for condo owners: every unit’s water comes from the same shared cistern. If the cistern is contaminated, every unit’s water is contaminated — regardless of individual precautions.
You can install the best under-sink RO system in your kitchen. You can replace your tinaco annually. You can test your water monthly. But if the building’s shared cistern has 5 cm of sediment, mature biofilm on the walls, and hasn’t been cleaned in two years, every gallon of water entering your unit started in that environment.
Individual filtration treats the symptom. Shared cistern maintenance treats the cause. Both matter, but don’t let the first substitute for demanding the second.
This is also why condo buyers should ask about the water system during due diligence — before closing. Request maintenance records, last cleaning date, cistern capacity relative to building size, and whether individual metering exists. A building that can’t answer these questions is a building that isn’t managing its water infrastructure.
What to Do as a Condo Owner
The free fix: Ask three questions at the next HOA meeting: (1) When was the shared cistern last cleaned? (2) Is there a water maintenance schedule and budget line item? (3) Can owners see maintenance records? The answers — or the inability to answer — tell you everything.
The cheap fix ($500–3,000 MXN): Install an under-sink carbon + UV or RO filter in your kitchen for drinking and cooking water. This protects you regardless of building cistern condition. If you have an individual tinaco, inspect and clean it annually — this is your responsibility, not the HOA’s.
The right fix (advocacy): Push for the HOA to adopt: annual shared cistern cleaning as a standing budget item, quarterly visual inspections documented with photos, annual water quality testing (basic microbial panel), and published maintenance records available to all owners. The per-unit cost is modest. The building value and livability improvement is significant.
Frequently Asked Questions
I rent a condo. Is water quality my problem or the landlord’s? Rento un departamento. ¿La calidad del agua es mi problema o del arrendador? The shared cistern is the building’s (and ultimately the HOA’s) responsibility. Your individual tinaco, if you have one, is typically the landlord’s responsibility under your lease — but it’s in your interest to ask when it was last cleaned. Point-of-use filtration for drinking water is usually on you as a tenant.
Can I install my own water treatment in my condo? ¿Puedo instalar mi propio tratamiento de agua en mi departamento? Yes. Under-sink RO or carbon + UV systems require minimal modification (just a connection at the cold water line under the kitchen sink and a small drain connection). No HOA approval is typically needed. Whole-house treatment is more complex and may require HOA approval if it involves modifications to building plumbing.
The water pressure in my unit is terrible. What can I do? La presión de agua en mi departamento es terrible. ¿Qué puedo hacer? If you’re on a high floor in a gravity-fed building, low pressure is physics. Options: install a small booster pump (check HOA rules first), install low-flow fixtures designed to perform well at low pressure, or advocate for the building to upgrade to a pressurized system. If pressure suddenly dropped, the issue might be the building pump, a leak, or a partially closed valve — report it to the administration.
My building has 50 units. How big should our cistern be? Mi edificio tiene 50 departamentos. ¿Qué tamaño debe tener la cisterna? The calculation is the same as for a house but at building scale: total daily consumption × target turnover days + buffer. For a 50-unit building with average 300L/unit/day consumption, that’s 15,000L/day. A 14-day turnover target means 210,000L of cistern capacity. Most large Cabo condos have shared cistern systems in the 50,000–200,000L range. If capacity is too small, the building relies on more frequent pipa deliveries, which increases cost and scheduling complexity.
Related Reading
New to the cistern concept? What Is a Cistern and How Does It Work? — the foundational explainer, written for homeowners but applies equally to condo systems.
Worried about your tinaco? If your condo has individual tinacos, Tinaco vs. Cisterna explains why the rooftop tank might be your bigger problem.
Want to understand the cost side? Pipa Pricing Guide covers how building-scale delivery pricing works and how to evaluate whether your HOA is getting a good deal.
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