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Utility company Southern Water, which supplies drinking water to millions of customers across the South of England, has announced that they’ve deployed Lightsonic’s technology that works by harnessing Openreach’s (BT) existing fibre optic broadband network to help detect underground water leaks in pipes.
As we’ve reported before (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 subtle changes in those light signals (e.g. polarisation) as they move along the fibre, which can help to monitor Earthquakes, Tsunamis and even with locating 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, which in its first three months had already been used to pinpoint 100+ leaks and was estimated to have saved 2 million litres of water a day. Since then we understand that the solution is now saving “over” 4 million litres of water per day and that’s across just 650km of the UK’s water network.