Summer 2025 update for retailers

How we’re saving water

School visits

Our Water Efficiency team has been working with schools and councils to help reduce the amount of water they use and waste.  

We have carried out 29 visits so far this year, repairing 40 leaks, installing 258 devices and saving 52,026 litres of water.  

Innovation fund

We are exploring launching an ‘innovation fund’, which will be available to retailers and third parties to share new and exciting water efficiency initiatives. We plan to launch this in autumn.  

We are happy to hear your ideas or collaborate on any water efficiency ideas in the meantime.  

If you have any ideas or questions about any of the topics, please email them to

wholesale@wessexwater.co.uk 

Smart metering

Our strategy

Smart metering is at the heart of our demand management strategy and the key to unlocking significant opportunities in water efficiency and leakage reduction. Proposed abstraction licence reductions mean that a supply-demand balance deficit is forecast by 2035. Smart metering enables us to proactively address this, protect our environment and ensure we have enough water for the future.

By 2030, 40% of properties in our area (household and non-household) will receive a smart meter, rising to 95% by 2035. We will be upgrading all existing meters and installing meters on unmeasured supplies where possible. We have already begun installing a small number of smart meters, primarily for household meter optants, with our wider rollout due to begin in September 2025.

We will begin rolling out AMI smart meters in the Salisbury area on a street-by-street basis by District Metered Area (DMA). We are focusing on Salisbury and the surrounding villages as it’s the most likely to become water-stressed due to abstraction licence reductions.

Timeline

Our AMP 8 target zones are split across the five years of the AMP cycle and into three delivery phases.

In September, our rollout will begin in the Salisbury area. For non-household customers, we will be installing meters where they have requested one or if their existing meter is faulty. Later this year, we will begin to install smart meters for new connections.

D1 notifications were sent at the end of May for the SPIDS we plan to upgrade to a smart meter up to April 2026. D2 notifications will be sent on a monthly basis for the following month confirming the SPIDS to be smart metered.  

We are in the process of setting up a SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) to share granular meter read data, we will share further details on this shortly. 

Loggers

We currently have around 800 loggers on non-household properties, which will be integrated into our smart metering estate. To do this the second channel of the existing logger will be used to collect meter index readings.

We have verified the accuracy of these at six sites by taking monthly meter reads to ensure there is no noticeable drift between the logger index read and the reading on the dials. We have reviewed ISO4064 (water meters for cold potable water and hot water) to ensure compliance. Reads from these loggers will be incorporated into our granular read data sharing, just like a smart meter.

We are currently exploring solutions with our provider to enable our smart meters to be logged. We want to ensure that logging requirements are maintained, so to begin with, any meters found with logging equipment will not be upgraded to a smart meter. 

Unmetered non-household customers

We have now been designated as a water-stressed area, which means we can make it compulsory for the small number of unmetered non-household customers to have a meter. We will be installing smart meters where possible, and the property will be moved to metered charges from the date the meter is installed. 

FAQs

Water resources and drought status  

The UK has experienced one of the driest periods in over a century. With temperatures rising, water demand has increased by up to 15%.  

The Environment Agency has now moved our region from normal (green) to prolonged dry weather (yellow) status to recognise the developing drought situation. 

River flows, groundwater, and reservoir levels are all lower than usual and continuing to fall.

See our water resources position, which is updated monthly, for more information.  

Our current drought status is 1b

We’re following our Drought Plan and are taking appropriate actions should the dry weather continue into the autumn. 

We currently forecast that we have enough water to maintain supplies to households and businesses across our region throughout the rest of the summer.  

We’re not planning a hosepipe or non-essential use ban at this stage, but we do need our customers to use water wisely

A letter was sent to all retailers on 7 August to ask for action from large volume users who could have a leak or could be wasting water.  

If you want help saying water, you may benefit from free internal plumbing leak fixes and leak detection training.