The wooden water tanks on Manhattan rooftops aren't decoration — they're how many older buildings above the sixth floor get their water. City pressure alone can't reach the upper stories, so water is pumped to a rooftop tank and fed by gravity to the floors below. Pressurized storage tanks and booster pump systems serve the same purpose in newer buildings. When any of that fails, the symptom is the same: weak pressure or no water on the upper floors, while the lower floors work fine.
What we work on
- Rooftop storage tanks — wooden and steel tanks and their feed lines, float valves and overflow pipes. Leaks, failing fill valves, and the tank-to-building piping that carries water down through the risers.
- Pressure tanks — the bladder and diaphragm tanks that maintain pressure in pumped systems. A failed bladder means short-cycling pump starts and pressure that surges then drops.
- Booster pump systems — the pumps that lift water to storage or pressurize lines in buildings without gravity feed. Pump failures, pressure-switch problems, and control issues.
- Tank-to-riser piping — the supply lines that run from rooftop storage down through the building, where corrosion and leaks affect whole stacks of apartments at once.
Repair or replace?
A pressure tank with a failed bladder is usually a replacement — the bladder isn't serviceable separately on most units, and a short-cycling pump will burn out the motor if the tank is left alone. A rooftop wooden tank has a real service life; routine maintenance (cleaning, inspections, float-valve replacement) extends it, but a tank that's leaking through staves or has structural rot is a replacement. Booster pumps are often repairable at the switch, control or seal level before the whole unit needs to go. We diagnose the specific failure and tell you whether you're looking at a valve, a pump rebuild or a full replacement.
Why this is different from a water heater
Water tanks here are about storage and pressure, not heating. A building tank holds cold water at height so gravity feeds the apartments; a pressure tank keeps a pumped system from short-cycling. Neither heats water — that's the water heater. The two systems are connected, though: a building with storage-tank water supply feeds the units whose individual water heaters then heat it. A pressure problem on the top floor could be a tank issue, a riser issue, or a unit-side problem — worth diagnosing correctly before replacing parts that aren't the cause.
A tank leak flooding a roof or running down through the building is an emergency. Pressure-loss problems that trace back to corroded risers connect to our pipe repair work. And any leak appearing inside an apartment from the supply side overlaps with leak repair.