Origin New Civil Engineer Feature

Solving the water sector’s leakage problem could be simpler than we thought

Leak reduction is one of the key goals for water companies in the UK and around the world, but the processes for finding and fixing them have been the same for decades. A UK technology company is changing that with its revolutionary innovations.

Every water company in the UK has leak reduction targets for the eighth asset management period (AMP8), 2025 to 2030, while Ofwat has set a goal of halving leaks across the whole network by 2050 (from a 2017-18 baseline).

However, repairing leaks on the network via traditional means of digging up the ground – often roads – is costly, disruptive and time-consuming. It can also be inaccurate.

This is a problem that Origin Tech founders Phil Surtees and John Marsden identified as an opportunity area, so they set to work on applying their expertise from the oil and gas sector to devising a solution.

What resulted was the Newcastle-based firm’s proprietary No Dig solution, which is now being used by 12 water companies in England to fix thousands of leaks annually without any of the drawbacks of the traditional method.

No Dig

When watching the No Dig solution at work on a test rig with transparent pipes where you can see it in action, it is surprisingly rapid. A solution goes into the pipe, moves swiftly to the leak and blocks it up in a matter of seconds. You could be forgiven for thinking it’s a futuristic cloud of carefully programmed nanobots. The truth is that it’s classic physics and chemistry.

The solution is a thick chalky substance with darker particles of various sizes floating in it. The particles are calcium carbonate and they are the element that blocks the hole. The solution comprises water and a xanthan gum gellant, similar to what’s used in yoghurt, to suspend the particles.

“The product was originally formulated for use in oil and gas drilling, but obviously that was something you couldn’t put into water pipes,” Surtees says. “During Covid, John and I went into a bubble together, got a unit on the Tees Valley industrial estate and started playing with formulas. We learned how to weld pipes by watching YouTube videos and basically changed the formula to something that was suitable to use in the water network.

“We gathered various pipes of different materials, diameters and thicknesses and built a test base. We could change the mixture and the temperature of the water to see what it would do to the gellant agent. We purposely put faults within the pipes, drew up a set of test regimes and worked our way through it until we came up with the best version of the product.”

From there it was a case of contacting water companies to gauge interest and Origin Tech was fortunate that it was the local water company, Northumbrian Water, that showed the initial interest.

“We pride ourselves on innovation,” says Northumbrian Water head of water networks Jim Howey. “We’ve got an Innovation Festival that was founded by our former director Nigel Watson which laid the foundations for us to look at the opportunities to do things differently.”

Origin Tech brought its No Dig solution to the 2021 Innovation Festival and Northumbrian Water immediately saw the potential. It decided to back the company with funding and use of
abandoned assets for testing the product.

At this point the solution worked, but a method for deploying it had not yet been devised.

“We helped them figure out how to get the product in and out of the pipe without affecting water quality and while maintaining safety,” says Northumbrian Water area manager within the water networks team Richard Irving.

The method the team figured out involves inserting the fluid to the communication pipe via a property’s boundary box, which sits between the water mains and the property and houses its meter and stopcock.

A specially designed T-piece is screwed into the top of the boundary box and the solution is poured in. A pump injects air into the T-piece until it is pressurised to 2 bar above the water pressure in the pipe. The solution is then released into the pipe and is drawn into the leak path where the calcium carbonate particles are pushed into the hole, tessellating in a way that rapidly blocks it up. The pressure is left on for five minutes and the remaining solution is then flushed back out of the pipe.

“It probably took a week or so to figure out how to do it,” Irving says. “Safety’s the biggest key alongside water quality, because you’ve got to be careful when you’re using compressed air. But we set up some trial rigs, replicated leaks and it worked.”

Once it was proven, it did not take long for Northumbrian Water to start using No Dig in the field. Starting in 2022, the company started changing its process.

“Once we had the method and we were pleased with how it worked, we started rolling it out as part of our centralised planning,” Irving said. “But what we had to do was brief all the teams on Northumbrian’s main water networks to say that, prior to raising a job for a leak repair, if it meets certain criteria – i.e. if it’s between the boundary box and the mains – we could try a No Dig repair.

“Getting everyone’s head around it was the big thing, because it was something new, but once people bought into it and realised we could do this, it became business as usual.”

Howey estimates that this only took six months to become part of Northumbrian’s regular work – and it wasn’t long before other water companies started to show an interest.

“The water industry’s leakage teams are on various forums together and a lot of people talk, so once somebody’s got a product that looks like it’s quite novel and working, word spreads quickly,” Surtees says.

“Water companies were ringing us because they realised we’d started using it as part of our business as usual, then they started coming up to see it demonstrated with Origin,” Irving says.

Today, with 12 of England’s water companies using Origin Tech’s No Dig solution, the company says at least 28M litres of water are being saved annually – although this is a conservative estimate as it only accounts for repairs carried out directly by Origin and doesn’t include water companies’ own usage of the tech.

However, it is believed that there is potential to do much more with No Dig.

“We’ve mainly looked at small bore pipe work – the communication pipes – but we’re working on mains pipe work with larger leaks, which has its own set of problems with regards to getting the product in and out,” Surtees says.

Compared to communication pipes, mains pipes can be much larger in diameter and the access point can be much further from the leak – potentially up to 50m away. Deploying the No Dig via the method currently being used on smaller pipes would therefore not be viable. Origin Tech has devised a new method to overcome these hurdles that has proven successful in testing.

“We’ve now developed a pinpoint deployment method where we go in with an acoustic microphone and a camera on an adapted hose reel with four-core cable in it that allows you to push it along the pipe,” explains Origin Tech commercial director Aidan Sunter.

“There’s a section in the end of it that is filled with No Dig and has a plunger in it that’s activated by air pressure.

“Once we send it down and locate the leak with the camera and microphone, we can take some imagery so we know where it is and what we’re fixing. Then we apply the pressure, which sends the plunger through the syringe element of the pipe and that dispenses the No Dig product through a nozzle.”

This localised deployment works with the same efficacy as the original method.

“The quantity of the product being put into the pipe can be reduced to an optimal amount,” Sunter continues. “We’re currently working on how much you need depending on the diameter of the pipe. At the moment, a 6in (15.2cm) diameter pipe is working with about 300ml of product, which is a really small quantity in a large flow of water.”

While the biggest hole that can currently be fixed by No Dig is around 6mm diameter – which accounts for the majority of leaks in the water network – Surtees thinks there is potential to go bigger.

“I think we can go larger, but if we increase the size of the [calcium carbonate] particles we currently use, we also increase weight,” he says. “I think we can probably go slightly higher, but it’s going to have its limiting point. We don’t know where that is yet, which is interesting.”

Find and Fix

No Dig is not the only way that Origin Tech is helping the water sector to overcome its leakage issues – it is also utilising satellite data and machine learning to help identify where leaks are occurring.

This development has been a long time coming in the water sector, which has been relying on the listening stick for decades. While modern iterations can now be hooked up to leak detection software, it still requires an engineer to go out in the field and insert a device into access points and decipher whether there is a leak in the vicinity. This is a time-consuming and inefficient approach – not to mention taxing for the water engineer.

Origin Tech is removing the legwork and increasing the accuracy through its use of satellite imagery and other data points.

“We’ve got remote sensing analysis that feeds into a GIS [geographic information system] model that we train with historic five-year data,” says Origin Tech No Dig manager Simon Scott. “It then plots that and trains itself to look at things like ground movement, soil moisture and vegetation growth – for example if grass is greener in a particular area. It trains itself to know that, historically, certain factors have indicated and been verified as a leak.

“Using that data, it can assess ‘points of interest’ on the water network based on the probability of a leak being there. Our technicians then visit the site and feed that back to the platform. If the leak is verified and it’s suitable for No Dig deployment, we will repair it then and there. If it’s not suitable for No Dig then we feed that back to the client to deal with it in the traditional manner.”

In cases where No Dig is usable, Origin says it is possible to go from identifying a leak to fixing it in as little as 60 minutes.

Numerous water companies are already using Origin’s proprietary data and dashboard to identify potential leaks on their networks. Again, Northumbrian was an early adopter.

“It’s like a one-stop shop,” says Howey. “This is what we need to do, because – for the whole industry – leakage is a massive challenge and over this AMP we’ve got targets to reduce leakage year on year.

“If you run through the normal process of what we’ve done previously, with a listening stick, it’s very time-consuming. Then if you think about how you would traditionally repair that; you would have to put a permit in before you can excavate the highway and that can take up to 10 working days – and there’s a cost. It’s getting more restrictive and soon there will be lane rental charges; some of these traffic-sensitive roads are going to be around £2,500 a day. And you have to be right on top of the leak, because the last thing you want to do is extend that excavation.

“So, Origin’s solutions really are a game changer. We want to support Origin moving forward so that we can repair every single leak on our network with this technology. That’s where we want to get to.”

03/11/2025

By Bob Hakimian