Water is a vital part of our day-to-day life. As your water company, we have a responsibility to protect the water supply for now and future generations.
Part of that involves using innovative technology to find and fix leaks across our network of 9,000 miles of pipes. Our team of leakage technicians work around the clock to make sure we're doing all we can to reduce and stop leakage.
What is leakage?
Leakage is the amount of water lost from pipes across the water network. We supply on average 542 million litres every day to 2.3 million customers through 9,000 miles of pipes.
There are many factors that affect leakage, but the three main ones are:
- Natural wear and tear on our network
There are over six million joints which have to withstand high pressure 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Inevitably sometimes these pipes and joints fail unexpectedly, but we work around the clock to repair them as quickly as possible. - The seasons
In typical weather conditions, the colder winter months increase leakage due to pipes shrinking, causing the joints between them to open up. Equally, warmer temperatures can undo this effect to reduce leakage. This is expected to even out during the year but leads to peaks and troughs in leakage levels. - Extreme weather events
These can impact leakage over and above the typical seasonal rise and fall. A freeze followed by a rapid thaw can over-stress pipes, causing them to burst. Similarly, prolonged hot dry periods can shrink the earth that supports pipes, causing them to move and break.
Our performance
We’re already among the top five water companies in the UK for our leakage performance, but we’re always striving to do more.
As a consequence of the very dry ground conditions and the resulting earth movement due to the ongoing heatwave and record-breaking temperatures, we have seen a 50 per cent increase in bursts across our network of 9,000 miles of pipes. The repair of all leaks and burst water pipes is being prioritised based on the impact on customers and the amount of water that is being lost, and we’re working with the highways authorities and other utilities to minimise disruption and congestion that road works can cause while repairs are being carried out.
Water is dense and to transport it successfully to homes and businesses we have to operate the system under immense pressure so some leakage is inevitable. Tackling leaks is a long-term challenge and one that the industry has been making good progress on.
In our supply area before the heatwave arrived, we were at an all-time low having cut down on the number of leaks across our region meeting the target set by our regulator for the last 13 years in a row.
During extreme weather events like heatwaves, we increase our capacity to find and fix leaks by as much as 20 per cent.
Over the next few years, we will be investing millions to make sure we continue to beat and improve our leakage targets, and are committed to reducing the amount of water lost to leaks both on our network, and in customers’ homes, by 15 per cent between 2020 and 2025. We’re also working to halve leakage by 2050 to 48.14 million litres a day.
This investment will go towards innovative technology to help us identify even the smallest of leaks. We’ll also aim to minimise leaks on our network by working to stabilise water pressures in our pipes.
Innovative ideas to tackle leaks
As well as working to drive down our leakage levels, we’re always looking at innovative ideas to identify and repair leaks.
Smart networks
An industry first, smart networks is not just smart metering. It’s a journey to visualise, analyse, monitor, predict and improve the real-time performance of our water network. Working with Vodafone UK we are the first utility in England to have a full NBIoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) commercial agreement in place.
The partnership will enable us to transmit data for analysis from digital water meters at 2,000 homes in a Kent trial area, as well as information from other network sensors.
If successful, smart networks has the potential to alert us to the smallest leaks on both our and our customers’ pipes soon after they occur, and could even enable us to predict and prevent pipeline failure before it happens.
Satellite technology
We’ve been trialling out of this world satellite technology to help us find and fix leaks on our vast network of underground pipes.
The trial is being run in collaboration with a company called SUEZ, which specialises in innovative water technologies and solutions. Covering a large area of Kent (including Canterbury, Maidstone, Ashford and Tenterden) satellite technology from a company called ASTERRA is being used to detect leaks that could be tricky to find with traditional methods.
Using technology that is used to look for water on other planets, the images created can cover an amazing 2,200 square miles. Our Technicians in the area have an app on their phones which shows the location of the suspected leak and gives them the ability to record any they find so we can assess the results of the trial.
Hive Leak Alerts
We teamed up with Hive to offer our customers FREE Hive Leak Alerts for 12 months.
The innovative Hive Leak Sensors detect possible leaks in your plumbing and send alerts directly to your smartphone. Hive Leak Alerts use a smart, easy to fit sensor which monitors the flow of water around your home to proactively detect anything out of the ordinary which could be a potential leak – helping you to avoid wasting water and to stay one step ahead of costly water damage.
You'll receive a notification straight to your smartphone if anything unusual is detected, as well as troubleshooting tools and tips in the Hive app.
Innovate with us
We’re working on a focused innovation strategy which targets our customers’ and stakeholders’ priorities, and will enable us to lead the industry.
As we enter our next five year business plan, we’re keen to keep on innovating and increasing customer satisfaction. If you have an innovative product or service that could help us achieve our goals, we would be delighted to hear from you.
Report a leak
Spotted a leak while out and about? Whether it's big or small, we want to know about them all. Reporting issues in your area is easy with our live, interactive map.
Just enter your postcode or street name and mark the leak on the map.
Engineering schemes
Ensuring clean, fresh tap water continues to flow to our customers’ taps 24 hours a day, seven days a week is one of our top priorities. That’s why we're constantly working to upgrade old water mains, install new pipelines, improve our water treatment works and maintain our reservoirs.