Yorkshire Water to roll out sewer alarm partnership following successful pilot

Yorkshire Water and tech firm Technolog have pledged to reduce the in-home and environmental risk and impact of sewer flooding across Yorkshire following a successful pilot project.

The utility company – which supplies more than five million customers, the millions of people who visit Yorkshire each year, and some 140,000 businesses – will install 35,000 Technolog customer sewer alarms at properties across Yorkshire.

The move follows a successful pilot project involving 5,000 devices in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and Doncaster, which won the Institute of Water North Region Innovation award.

Once installed, the customer sewer alarms will monitor water levels within combined sewer gullies using a pressure sensor which sends an alert remotely when an increase in level is identified.

The devices use a wireless network allowing Yorkshire Water teams to identify trends in how sewers are performing, enabling the firm to quickly analyse, identify and proactively respond to increases in sewer levels which are often signs that precede sewage escaping the network onto streets or into people’s homes.

Henry Dixon, business transformation manager at Yorkshire Water, explained that the project represents a “significant investment” and forms a key part of Yorkshire’s ambition to bolster the technology in operation across its network.

“The devices will provide vital insight into the performance of the network, allowing our teams to monitor flows and understand network performance remotely,” he said.

“Our successful pilot project helped to prevent sewer flooding in homes and gardens, improved our customers’ experience by alerting us to blockages before they caused a problem and saved time and cost on our customer field services visits by attending proactively to resolve problems before they caused flooding.

“The expansion of the project will ensure we can quickly identify potential problems and mobilise our teams to investigate the network before there is an impact on our customers and/or the environment across Yorkshire.”