What we're doing to minimise leaks
Water is a precious natural resource and we want to look after it. To reduce the amount of water lost from our network, we’re aiming to halve leakage by 2050. That’s why our teams are working seven days a week to find and fix leaks.
Why is it so important to reduce leakage?
The South East is water stressed and we’re facing an increased risk of drought and hosepipe bans because of the impacts of population growth and climate change. While we look at new ways to capture and treat water, we must also work together to save every drop, which is why we’re investing in new technology to find and fix more leaks on our network than ever before.
Leakage is water that we can’t account for. It’s gone into supply but hasn’t reached your homes and businesses or been used by us.
Leaks happen for many reasons: old pipes, changes in pressure or damage from ground movement. They increase during dry or freezing weather as the ground expands and contracts. Illegal standpipes, high commercial water use, and other industrial misuse can also cause unexpected pressure surges in the water mains, leading to burst pipes.
We’re making progress on reducing demand – over the past 30-years we’ve reduced the amount we put into supply by 200 million litres. We’ve also reduced leakage by about a third over that period and aim to halve it by 2050.
What we're doing about leakage
Fixing leaks
Since 2020, we have significantly increased our find-and-fix teams and we now have around 200 dedicated technicians working around the clock, fixing around 500 leaks a week, that’s around close to 25,500 leaks a year.
We use several repair methods, all which help maintain water pressure and reduce the risk of impacting water quality and discolouration. We’re also working with customers to help them identify and fix leaks around their home with our LeakBot trial.
Preventing leaks
We’re working hard to replacing ageing pipes. This can be disruptive to the local community but upgrading our network will ultimately benefit everyone as it removes the need for ad-hoc, often more disruptive, repairs.
We’ve also introduced an advanced pressure management scheme to control high or varied water pressure that fatigues pipes, causing busts. We’re continuing to trial new technology and materials to strengthen our network and limit disruption.
Detecting leaks
Our 13,919 kilometre network is divided into smaller metered areas for more accurate monitoring. We use a system called Waternet, which shows us where there might be leaks through a series of sensors that gather flow data.
We also have other sensors that are listening for leaks – we call them acoustic loggers – which hear when water is escaping our
network. We’ve fitted over 7,500 acoustic loggers to detect burst pipes and are trialling more technologically advanced versions.
Locating leaks
Our team use a combination of sound devices, satellite mapping, and more recently, AI modelling to understand where a leak or bust has happened. There’s a huge amount of data helping our leakage technicians locate a leak as quickly as possible so our field team can fix the problem sooner.
Everything you need to know about leakage
Rather than measuring the actual amount of water lost, which would be impossible, we work out the total amount lost. We add up all the water put into supply – around 566 million litres a day – and subtract the water used or lost through leaks on customers’ pipes.
Water meters help, as 89% of our customers now have a meter, we’re able to get more accurate readings of customer usage. Of course, some water is also used for activities such as firefighting, or keeping the water mains clean, but any remaining water that is unaccounted for is classed as leakage
Our leakage target is set each year by our industry regulator, Ofwat. These targets are based on the length of pipes we’re responsible for.
That’s a lot of pipes across our 13,919-kilometre network, 232 service reservoirs and 655 pumping stations. If we don’t meet our leakage target, we must pay a regulatory penalty.
In 2019, Ofwat changed how water companies report leakage, asking all companies to report a three-year average of leakage. This makes comparisons between companies easier, and any trends more visible. It also means that reported figures are less skewed by exceptional weather events.
To reach the level of zero leaks would be very difficult as some are very small and hard to detect. Often these are under roads or customers’ properties so finding and fixing them can be very disruptive.
We work with lots of different agencies, including the Highways authorities, to avoid traffic disruption and clashes with other utility works.
Sometimes these applications to carry out work can take up to six months. We also sometimes need to get land entry permissions to work on private land. We always aim to get visible leaks completed within 24 to 48 hours if we have permissions and access.
If a leak is discovered outside your property, we'll work hard to identify the cause, make the necessary repairs, and get your supply back to normal as soon as possible. If we need to shut off the water to repair the leak, we'll let you know in advance.
We report our leakage figures to our regulator, who benchmarks them against other companies in the water sector. You can see how we’re performing against our peers on the DiscoverWater website.
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