Small steps with big impact on future water supply

Our dedicated water efficiency team has been supporting Essex & Suffolk Water’s flagship project “Every Drop Counts” for the last 11 years in an industry leading approach that engages communities to offer information and the ability to conserve water and help them upgrade their home infrastructure to be more resource efficient. Through this process we prepare households and industry for the potential of a water scarce future and help preserve river habitats and future supplies.

Every Drop Counts uses a carefully planned combination of targeted recruitment and community marketing to engage specific whole town areas for water efficiency activity. Crucially to help build consumer confidence, Every Drop Counts, offers home visits to repair leaking taps and toilets, inspect and where applicable upgrade water fittings to become more efficient and provide customers with up to £130 of free water saving products. These products include toilet dual flush conversion devices, tap aerators to reduce outlet flow rates, a bath buoy to reduce the amount of water required to fill a tub and water butts for the capture and storage of rain water.

Since the start of the current framework in 2014, we have successfully completed nearly 14,000 home visits and retrofits for Essex & Suffolk Water. Participating customers are each saving on average 24.3 litres per day.

This equates to an annual average saving of 8,869 litres each which in turn results in monetary savings of approximately £21 on each participating customer’s water and sewerage bills.

Britain’s driest counties

Essex & Suffolk Water, which is a subsidiary of Northumbrian Water, operates in one of the driest areas of the country and draws most of its water from rivers, boreholes and aquifers. As rainfall patterns change and long dry spells become the norm, the company has to carefully manage its options. Abstraction from local chalk streams has to be stopped over the next five years to preserve these rare flows and habitats. At the same time levels of all rivers must be maintained and boreholes and aquifers recharged while providing guaranteed supplies to populations expected to increase by up to 34% in Essex and 29% in Suffolk over the next 40 years.

The right thing to do

Essex & Suffolk Water strives to go above and beyond what is required by industry regulators through an altruistic aim to educate and change consumer behaviour by empowering its customers to self-propagate efficiency and reduce consumption as our water resources become scarcer and demand increases.

During each phase of the project we engage, on behalf of Essex & Suffolk Water, 15,000 customers with the aim of completing 3,000 home visits and through the installation of as many water saving products as possible and maximising their achieved savings. WSP extensively trains the installation team in high quality customer service before they enter customers’ homes to ensure that the Every Drop Counts experience is always positive. It is an important part of our culture to place high value on client care, whether it is our direct employer or the end user such as their customers. And the successes of the Every Drop Counts programme are clear with an overall average customer satisfaction level of 99%.

All customer contact and scheduled visits are managed through our dedicated Customer Contact Centre and extensive volumes of data are recorded and analyzed from each property to ensure optimum levels of both savings and service are achieved. Essex & Suffolk Water, via the Every Drop Counts initiative has also been engaged in behavioural economics to find out how best to encourage customers to change domestic behaviour, working with professors from Universities of Chicago in the US, Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the UK. This has allowed us to target those customers most likely to benefit from Every Drop Counts.