Thames Water has claimed it will achieve the industry’s biggest leakage reduction this century thanks to smart meters.
The company said data from its circa 450,000 smart meters across London helped to find and repair leaks over the past year managing a 15 per cent overall reduction for 2019/20 – saving 11 million litres each day.
Smart water meters are being rolled out across Thames’ region at pace to reduce consumption, with data showing households on a meter use up to 17 per cent less water. Thames Valley and rest of London are anticipated to be metered by 2025.
Earlier this week, Ofwat boss Rachel Fletcher praised the company’s efforts to drive down leakage rates and said it was set to meet its targets for the first year of AMP7.
Over the past year the meters helped find 13,500 leaks on customer supply pipes and saved around 18 million litres every day. Thames said an average of 1,400 leaks were repaired each week.
Steve Spencer, operations director, called the result “a huge step forward” and thanked the technology and teams for the boost in performance.
“Working with our customers, the data has given us a much greater understanding of what’s happening underground and saved millions of litres of water every day. The backlog of repairs to water pipes is down to its lowest level in a decade.
“We’re now determined to build on this momentum for another 20 per cent drop in leakage over the next five years, and then go much further as part of ambitious long-term plans to re-plumb London and the Thames Valley.”
Ofwat fined Thames in 2017 after assessing the company had let customers down by its approach to tackling leakage.
Following Ofwat’s investigation the company made progress with leakage and delivered cuts of 13 per cent in March compared to the previous year.
Ofwat set Thames a goal of reducing leakage by 20.4 per cent during AMP7, which is purposefully higher target than the rest of the sector to reflect previous performance.