Lead Pipes Replacement & Plumbosolovency

Challenge

The prominence and prevalence of lead in our water supply (lead pollution/plumbosolvency) can lead to issues in human health. For many years the water sector has had to control this with orthophosphate chemical dosing, adding additional cost to the treatment process.

South West Water has committed to the long-term goal of being lead free by 2050. However, there is very limited information on where lead service pipes were originally installed.

Research

This project is developing a sophisticated ‘Lead pipe finder’ to predict the location of lead service pipes in South West Water’s water supply network. The model utilises a wide variety of data, and employs machine learning and artificial intelligence to estimate the likelihood of finding lead service pipes at individual properties, which is helping bridge gaps in the existing data.

Research

Impact

The model is currently in development with promising results which are already being used to improve the efficiency of the lead replacement programme. This project is highly impactful because if lead and lead pipes are removed, orthophosphate dosing can be reduced (or stopped) and less dosing means fewer chemical treatment processes, saving money.

All this results in benefits against a triple bottom-line of people, profit, planet through:

Improved health outcomes for our customers through improved drinking water quality.
Reduced cost to the business to supply drinking water.
Carbon reduction supporting our efforts to reach net zero by 2030.