Origin Technologies make "The Times"

Water firms tackle hosepipe bans by pinpointing leaks ... from space

Satellites and Al spot areas of concern that can be fixed faster, saving millions of litres a day, Ben Cooke writes.

If you spotted Paul Telford and Giles Surman out of your front window, you might wonder what on earth they were doing. Marching from house to house, they pause outside each one, jab a long metal stick at the ground, and press an ear to its top, as though listening to the pavement. Peculiar though this routine may seem, you should be thankful they perform it, because without it your taps might run dry.

Telford and Surman technicians for Northumbrian Water.

They spend their days lifting the small black lids that punctuate the pavement, and listen for the hiss of a leak from the pipes beneath. "Sometimes we open up hundreds of boxes before finding a leak," Telford said. "It's pretty boring. Nah, it's not actually, because when you find a leak it's good." Surman added: "Most important thing, isn't it, water?"

Telford said: "It's all right on a sunny day like today. But in the wind and rain, we're still out looking for them. The rain interferes with your listening."

Most of the leaks they find spray out about a litre a second, which might not sound like much until you consider that there are 86,400 seconds in a day.

On an average day three billion litres of water are lost this way in Britain one in every five pumped into the water network. It is partly thanks to leakage that water companies have had to impose hosepipe bans on nearly nine million customers this summer to stop reservoirs falling perilously low.

This problem has always dogged water companies. The efforts of technicians such as Telford and Surman have managed to reduce it by 41 per cent since 1989. But with Britain having just endured its driest spring on record and with climate change threatening to make summers more arid, the pressure is on to reduce it further.

The Environment Agency has warned that unless water companies halve leakage, build more reservoirs and encourage their customers to use less water, England will face a shortage of five billion litres a day by 2055. So Telford and Surman are in a race against time. It's fortunate, then, that technology is helping them speed up. Northumbrian Water has partnered with a -Newcastle-based start-up,

Origin Tech, which has worked out how to spot leaks via satellite. Origin's analysts have noticed that when satellites project radar signals at wet ground, the signals bounce back at a different amplitude than they would from dry ground, giving a clue as to where pipes may be leaking, they have also noticed that land around leaky pipes is more likely to subside and be heavily vegetated. Combining all these clues, their artificial intelligence model can spot a leak with 80 per cent accuracy.

With the tech companies help, Telford and Surman no longer have to traipse about entire housing estates.They can narrow down the location of a leak to a 20 metre radius. "It saves you walking five or six miles," Telford said.

Origin claims that without its technology, leakage technicians spot about one leak a day, and with it, they spot four or five. "The satellite's pretty good, like." Telford said. "You find leaks at the majority of points it's spotted. You get the odd one where I don't know what it's picked up. But it's a lot quicker."

The Origin team has also worked out how to fix leaks without digging up the road, saving a great deal of time, expense and motorists annoyance. They do so by filling the leaky pipes with a grey goo made from calcium car-bonate. As the goo leaks out of the pipe, the calcium carbonate particles get stuck in the hole, sealing it up. The goo is then pumped back out, leaving the pipe watertight,

Working with water companies including Thames, Affinity, Yorkshire and the Pennon Group, which owns South West Water, Origin has used satellites to spot leaks spouting 20 million litres a day and used its no-dig technology to fix 10,000 pipes, saving 100 million litres a day.

John Marsden, the company's founding director, said: "Those numbers are mainly just from doing trials with water companies. We can easily double or triple those numbers as we scale up so I think we'll make an impact.

"Most of the leaks we find are the ones that are really hard to find. We're not going to find all the leaks but there are still lots of low-hanging fruit."

Jeremy Heath, the zero leakage project lead at UK Water Industry Research, said that as Britain attempted to save water in the face of climate change, new technologies to find and fix leaks would be really useful.

He said: "Halving leakage is going to be really tricky to do. Places like Tokyo, Singapore and Holland have achieved really low leakage, but they've done that by replacing their entire pipe net-work. We could do that but it would be really expensive.

"So solutions like Origin's that allow us to carry out the repairs quickly and without having to dig up the road are really, really useful indeed."