Anglian Water is extending its use of thermal imaging drones to detect leaking water pipes – the utility’s performance on leakage is already around half the national average.

The new technology has already been used to successfully identify leaks in the rural villages in Norfolk, and the company plans to trial the new technology more over the coming months.

The drones have already saved Anglian Water time and money by finding hard-to-spot leaks.

The sensor and camera on the drone can identify differences in soil temperature which could be caused by water escaping from the pipe. The differences are then investigated further by a leakage technician on-site, rather than needing to be analysed back in the office.

With nearly 40,000 kilometres of water pipes, much of it in rural and remote areas, Anglian Water hopes the aerial technology will help reduce the cost and time taken to find a leak and pinpoint its location more precisely by spotting changes in soil temperature near the water pipes.

Paul Valleley, Director of Water Services for Anglian Water said the company is determined to keep reducing leaks, commented:

“Anglian Water is bucking the trend. We’ve cut leakage every year since privatisation in 1989 and our leakage is at record low levels - around half the national average. We have set ourselves much tougher targets than those set by our regulator, and beaten them for three years running.”

 “The East of England is a dry region and we want to do as much as possible to conserve water. Addressing the challenge of leakage is one of the reasons we can be confident that there won’t be a hosepipe ban in the Anglian Water region this summer.”

“Last year we achieved our lowest ever level of leakage beating the target Ofwat set us, and we have ambitious targets to do even more. We’ve launched a £60m war on leakage to continue driving levels down even further between now and the end of the decade.”

Over the last few years the water company has recruited a 300-strong team focussed purely on leakage.

Anglian has also invested in state-of-the-art technology - innovative pressure management schemes are dramatically reducing bursts and leak Technologies being used by the Intensive Leakage Teams  include the thermal imaging drones  and specialist robots .