Water usage driven more by behaviour than socioeconomics or weather

Customer behaviour and choices are key to halving freshwater abstraction sustainably by 2050, a study by UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) has shown.

The project to understand household water usage looked at six-month billing data, daily consumption and hourly usage to compare how water was used at different times of day, on weekends or weekdays as well as seasonally.

It showed 10 per cent of households use 25 per cent of the total water consumed, which UKWIR said highlights the importance of an effective water efficiency strategy for high users.

The work used existing consumption data from seven water companies that spanned three to four years to find evidence in the data to explore socio-demographic factors and behavioural information as a means of targeting water efficiency measures.

The work is part of UKWIR’s wider project that will explore minimising losses from supply and treatment systems; making the supply drought resilient and understanding the risks to availability of water supplies.

The research found socioeconomics and weather do not have as significant impact on the demand for water as behaviour and choice, so understanding these better is important to change consumption patterns.

Hourly consumption data was analysed and 10 profiles of consumption were identified that customers could be assigned to. Continuous flow suggested a property with leaks, intermittent usage throughout the day suggested people working from home while other profiles indicated higher usage in morning, evening or both. The hourly data suggested people display different habits on different days or throughout the year.

Properties moved between the 10 clusters at different times but between 46 and 62 per cent of households remained within their group from month to month. At weekends, between 24 and 59 per cent of households remained within a group from month to month.

Paul Merchant, UKWIR programme lead and supply demand manager at South West Water, said the work gave water companies “a tantalising glimpse” of a completely novel way of understanding and reducing demand.

“This project supports the idea that the effect of customer behaviour has a bigger impact on water consumption than socioeconomics or weather. This provides potential new avenues for how companies target their water efficiency activities and assess the likely impacts.”

HR Wallingford, which led the project with Decision Lab and Mease, made the following recommendations to water companies:

• Consider metering data from a data-driven perspective and use UKWIR’s methodology to explore patterns.
• Develop a common methodology to make best use of metering in line with emerging best practice.
• Record and archive data to analyse demand in the future and consider the value of higher resolution data.
• Collaborate to create data sharing standards to minimise delays while ensuring no risk of data breaches.
• Conduct your own analysis of metering data to identify factors specific to their supply area.

Andrew Ball, technical director at HR Wallingford said: “The project’s outputs reflect the complexity of trying to calculate the various components of overall demand for water; this is not a case of one set of analysis and one magic quick fix that helps reduce demand at the tap and therefore abstractions from our natural environment.”

He added the data enabled new approaches by the team to undertake different analysis and produce an interesting range of conclusions. “We have used some techniques which, as far as we are aware, have not been used before. The result is the potential for a whole new insight into how we understand water use, and in particular the variations between properties.”

The data were gathered before the pandemic caused a shift in working patterns.

UKWIR will host workshops on the topic in the summer to further explore how big data can be used to understand and change consumer behaviour.