Water utilities and developers

Water operations and leakage management

Pressure management

Water supply undertakings have a statutory duty to deliver water at a prescribed pressure. This requires any pressure reduction programme to be carefully designed to balance leakage saving against customer services.

Whilst fixed outlet pressure reducing valves (PRV's) have been installed in distribution systems for many years, flow modulated PRV's provide far greater stability of outlet pressure for a varying demand thus enabling the performance of the distribution system to be more finely tuned.

A reduction in pressure may have significant consequences for customers and undertakings need to take this fully into account when determining local procedures.

Domestic customers may have adjusted stopcocks to alleviate high flow rates whilst commercial premises may be relying upon a specific pressure reduction proposal. In other circumstances, undertakings may wish to only notify customers by letter of such proposals.

Whilst careful design should minimise complaints, unacceptably low pressures may have been experienced historically, perhaps due to shared services or unusual demand.

In these circumstances the pressure may need to be readjusted. In areas where the design pressure is met without incident or problems, there may be scope for further reduction at a later date.

In the past, technology within water distribution systems was sparse and usually of a simple mechanical nature. As the value of water resources has increased, technology has increased in complexity though the advancements have enabled this technology to be compact, more accurate and comparatively inexpensive.

Also see our Section dealing with Distribution Networks