UKWIR examines consumption in project to halve abstraction

The most comprehensive analysis project into water consumption ever conducted has gotten underway, bringing together data sets on usage from across the British Isles.

The research coordinated by the UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) together with analysts HR Wallingford will pool information gathered from water companies in the UK and Ireland to give a detailed analysis of how and when water is used in both the domestic and business markets.

The work is a strand of a larger UKWIR investigation ‘How do we halve freshwater abstraction in a sustainable way by 2050?’. The project aims to better understand the risks of abstraction to different water supplies and will also explore minimising water losses from treatment process, and drought resilient water supplies such as re-use and water recycling.

Paul Merchant, supply demand manager at South West Water and project lead said the study is designed to give the most accurate picture about water consumption to then show how usage can be cut.

“If you want to know where you are going to you need to know where you are now,” Merchant said. “It will look at what we know about customer demand, what affects that and how to get a better handle on water usage.”

Once the data is pooled together the teams will carry out analysis to give better insight into why water consumption is different in different regions.

“I hope we find that by the time we bring in different factors and behaviour we find that customers’ behave fairly similarly across the country and the differences are attributed to demographics or metering rather than that people in one part of the country use more than in another. The level of metering has a huge impact on consumption.”

Merchant said the level of metering has a huge impact on consumption and the rollout of smart meters also provide high time-resolution data. “Technology has got to a point we can start getting a lot of data from a lot of households that will really start opening up avenues for analysis,” he said.

Previously six-monthly meter reads were used, which only gave limited data about how customers responded to weather changes or events.

“Now we’ve got more and more high-quality data, the sheer volume can be quite intimidating, so we are looking at up-to-date analysis techniques and high-quality data science not just basic statistics. The data science approach is all about letting the data do the talking instead of any preconceived notions about what it might show.”

The information will be examined for patterns that give a clearer understanding of customer demand at any given time.

Merchant explained this is the first step on the roadmap for achieving deep reductions in consumption by household and non-household users. Learnings from the project will guide future research and enable companies to deploy water efficiency resources most effectively.

The data will include hourly or 15-minute meter reads, which will indicate continuous flows to show where water is being used in a hosepipe or lost through leaks. It will also show internal or external use of water to get a picture of how much is used in the garden or washing the car to then target water efficiency messages, although that is not a part of UKWIR’s project.

“The way technology has advanced in the last few years we have got significantly better data over the past two or three years than ever before,” Merchant said.

He added that the lockdown period will most likely be excluded from the baseline because habits were vastly altered, but that data will be used for other insights.