South East Water has invested £133,000 in new leak detection technology - the water company spends £13 million everying year on identifying and repairing leaks.

The utility has bought 200 correlating loggers designed specifically for town centres and a thousand of the most up-to-date lift and shift noise loggers for elsewhere, placing them underground onto the pipes to monitor the sound of the water passing through the network.

The correlating loggers listen to any sound coming from the pipes between 2am and 4am, and transmit the data back to the office for analysis.

The technology enables the water company’s leak detection team to easily hear any leaks and make repairs before they cause any major problems in the water network.

The new more sensitive and accurate correlating loggers have replaced the basic ones used for many years and which have only given the leak information in numerical form.

Gary Ford, Leakage Detection Manager at South East Water, said:

“We care about finding and fixing leaks as quickly as possible, but with most hidden underground and out of sight we need to use specialist technology like these loggers and correlators to track them down before we can repair the pipe.”

 “These loggers and correlators are just two pieces of state-of-the-art technology in our armoury used in our ongoing battle to plug leaks.”

South East Water spends £13 million annually finding and fixing leaks in a 24-hour operation with a specially trained team out 24-hours a day, whatever the weather, listening to pipes and identifying the leaks.