This week has seen a very early cold snap in some areas of the UK with several days of below zero temperatures. These are nervous times for anyone involved in reducing leakage from the water network. This is because the UK has a history of cold winter weather events leading to increased leakage. Put simply, a prolonged cold spell followed by a rapid thaw can lead to a significant breakout in leakage from the water network and from customers pipes. The last of these events was in December 2022, which resulted in a prolonged increase in leakage as companies struggled to find and fix all the leaks that broke out.
The figure below shows the number of events per day in a water network in England. An event is leak or a burst, either in the network or on a customer’s premises. The data is produced using a machine learning algorithm analysing live data.
Prior to the 6th December 2022, there is a normal level of events. The freeze/thaw period is shown by the orange box, from the 6th to the 18th December when the thaw started. We can see from the 10th there is a rapid increase in events, with a sudden increase through the thaw period. After the peak, the events are rapidly brought under control, but there remains a residual that is twice the pre-freeze/thaw level.
Predicting these events any more than a few days ahead is difficult, therefore reacting quickly to any initial break-out in an area is key to bring the network back under control quickly. Data driven insights in real time (such as those illustrated above) can give leakage teams a head start in reacting to such events.
