South West overhauls leakage for AMP7

South West Water has seen its leakage repair productivity rates soar in recent months compared to historic averages, Utility Week chats to the teams involved about the challenges AMP7 presents and how the company will tackle them.

Mark Hillson, director of customer services and networks, and Wayne Arscott, leakage delivery manager, explain how the quiet of lockdown has enabled the teams to be 15 per cent more productive in the past month, but that this coincided with a complete overhaul of the leakage teams for AMP7.

Hillson said: “We have a different scale of challenge in this AMP cycle with the first real reduction in leakage for a number of years for all companies, and that required a different approach. We have to transition leakage downwards in real terms.”

He said the focus moved away from measuring against static targets to also include the transitional rate of leakage, which the 15 per cent reduction target is measured against.

“This AMP presented a new challenge about how to put teams to work, how to focus activity on discrete work streams and to understand how much leakage was on the customer side – which is about 25 per cent,” Hillson said.

Each year companies calculate the natural rate of rise of leakage over 12 months if no action was taken, and what work is needed to simply maintain the same level. To improve on the transitional rate of leakage South West needs to reduce total leakage from approximately 118 megalitres a day to around 100 megalitres by 2025.

Arscott explained that the new structure splits the two elements out and that different techniques benefit each separately.

“There are certain technologies and techniques that are very pertinent to water detection for the natural rate of rise – such as acoustic loggers that allow us to cover large parts of the network pretty quickly,” Arscott said. “But to get to lower levels of leakage we need a different approach, we need to spend time to understand what is driving the underlying levels of leakage, which is inherently a much more difficult, challenging aspect. If something has been there for a long time and hasn’t been found, then it’s for a reason – because it is harder to find.”

Arscott explained the role technology must play as the whole industry moves towards machine-learning type solutions to bring data sets together. “We get data from pressure, flow, acoustics, temperature etc that we are really looking to the market, to universities and suppliers to see how can we leverage these together to not only detect and pinpoint leakage but also to predict where breaks might be.

“We have got all this data and we have to make the best use of it that we can.”

Hillson added the technology is available to meet the targets set by Ofwat, but it is still in its infancy: “There is a lot of momentum in the industry around the data analytics side of things to tie up with machine learning and AI technology.”

“The industry has more than ever come together on leakage – there are innovation sharing and best-practice sharing groups at regional and national level. The sector knows it’s an industry-wide challenge and we all need to come together to understand best practice from across the industry to achieve the targets. The challenge is bringing it all together and trying to make sure we are all moving at the same speed.”

South West has a research centre that works with Exeter University on systems to utilise machine learning and AI to carry out some of the repeatable, manual tasks by analysing data and sound files.

Arscott said this is relatively new to South West for AMP7 but they are hoping to make considerable gains over the next two to three years.

The work was previously divided into six regions for South West, plus one for Bournemouth, but there is now a central team to undertake work for the whole region, which Arscott said has enabled a consistency of approach across the whole area.

This new approach coincided with the lockdown, which itself meant the teams had to adapt quickly.

Some logistical changes such as only having one person in a van instead of two were made, but Arscott said the main impact of lockdown on proactive leakage detection was deciding not to work in urban areas and instead to target the long lengths of mains piping that link rural villages in the region.

He said the teams had to leverage different ways of using technology such as much more sensitive sensors that resulted in great successes targeting leaks on longer lengths of piping in rural areas.

“One of the positives to come out of it has been to try new things which have led to great leakage finds. For leakage purposes, the quieter it is the easier it is to find the leaks, so the teams have really benefitted from there being less traffic,” Arscott said. “That’s been a big bonus to us especially in areas where we might have had to go out at night because the road is too busy we have been able to work during normal hours.”

These have included industrial areas where there would ordinarily be a lot of noise and high demand that made it harder to notice and find leaks.

Hillson explained: “While the industrial areas have been quiet, we have taken fixed network loggers out to understand the leakage profile in some of these places. These fixed network loggers send data back on a daily basis for analysis.”

He said around 1,500 of these have been deployed in large industrial estates during lockdown to take advantage of the reduction in demand and separate out the leakage from demand.

“We found several leaks that we previously hadn’t found because the sound was being masked or there was too much demand that we wouldn’t have noticed there was a leak.”

As normal activity resumes the challenges of hunting leaks in loud, busy places will return and Hillson said they would need to adapt working practices as restrictions ease.

Another benefit the teams have experienced has been using video calls for meetings, which has opened up the possibility of site visits being conducted remotely utilising similar technologies.