Scottish Water is using innovative technology to predict the location and timing of where a pipe burst will occur.

According to the utility, it does this by examining data on previous bursts and previous customer contact in relation to bursts, and works out where future incidents are likely occur.

The water company, which provides 1.34 billion litres of drinking water daily and removes 847 million litres of waste, says that by using this tech it was able to prevent 2,000 bursts from happening in 2018, saving £2 million in the process.

Since implementing the technology, the company says there has been a 35% reduction in customer contact – as fewer people are ringing about bursts and their associated impact including water loss and low pressure. It also says it has delivered an energy saving of more than £40,000.

The system has been so effective that Scottish Water forecasts that by 2021 it will have saved the company £4.1 million in operational costs. The project, which has been running for five years, analysed the historic data of more than 60,00 incidents of burst in the drinking water network to determine where they were most frequent and why within a 5km radius of pumping stations.

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The data revealed that transients, a short-lived pressure wave, increased the likelihood of a burst. These waves can be caused by normal variation in water demand patterns, or they can be triggered by a pump starting or stopping.

Before the discovery of transients, the water industry lacked an understanding of them. To gain greater insight into transients, the project’s team developed high-speed data loggers, a device connected to water metres to track the volume of water on a constant basis, allowing them to process samples at a rate of 120 per second.

Scott Young, leakage delivery Team Leader at Scottish Water, said: “This work was critical, as it led us to a real understanding of how the network operates. We can see where transients occur, how they travel through the network, what speed they travel at.

“Information from the loggers allowed us to see what happened in the network when we tried starting pumps using a variable speed drive, compared to a regular start. We slowed the start-up down to two to three minutes and discovered the pump did not shock the network – the slower start-up no longer caused transients, this was key to the findings.

“This knowledge puts us at the leading edge of the water industry. We have already started sharing our findings across the UK, with others looking to replicate what Scottish Water is doing. It could also affect how we could approach things like investment in the future.”

Currently, the data is being applied at 110 sites across Scotland with an average 81% reduction within that 5km radius, and has so far has prevented 2,500 expected pipe bursts. With each burst costing £1,400 a time it has generated a saving of £2 million and means better service for Scottish Water’s five million plus customers.