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Portsmouth Water has today announced that they’re set to become the latest utility company to deploy Lightsonic’s technology, which works by harnessing Openreach’s (BT) existing Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network across the UK to help detect underground water leaks in pipes.
As we’ve reported before (here, here, here, and here), fibre optic cables aren’t only useful for transmitting data using pulses of laser light. Such cables can also be used to detect tiny changes in light signals (e.g. polarisation) as they move along the cable, which can help to monitor Earthquakes, Tsunamis and even to locate underground water leaks via Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) or Distributed Fibre Optic Sensing (DFOS).
Earlier this year we reported on how Lightsonic and Openreach had been trialling such a technology in the UK with Affinity Water. The service has since expanded and we understand that it enables technicians to find four times as many leaks and is already saving 1.2 million litres per day per 100km every year. Last month also saw Southern Water join the service, which supplies an area of c.4,450 sq. km and serves 2.7 million customers.