We know any disruption to your water supply can be worrying. If there’s ever an unplanned interruption (either because our network or infrastructure has failed and you have no water from your taps, or we’ve told you not to drink or use your water), we’ll always work as fast as we can to get things back to normal.  


Here are the things we’ll do when things aren’t quite right with your water supply. 

 

What we'll do and when 
In the first instance, we’ll always look to divert water from elsewhere in our network to keep as many homes on water as we can, or bring in tankers to pump water directly into the pipes while we work to put things right. This might mean you have water coming from your taps, but it’s at a lower pressure than normal until we’ve made our repairs. Unfortunately it’s sometimes not possible for us to do either of those things – particularly if the repair is particularly complicated either because of what we need to do and/or where we need to do it.  

Within 24 hours of us becoming aware of a failure of our network or us telling you to not drink or use your water, we’ll supply your water in a different way. This could be either supplying bottled water or setting up large tanks of water at customer collection hubs, or deliveries of bottled water to your door.


Which of these options we decide to do depends on:  

 

  • how big the issue is
  • how many people are affected 
  • how long the water supply could be affected for 
  • the geographical area (e.g. the ease of getting large vehicles into the area) 

 

We’ll supply each affected person with at least 10 litres of water per person per day. If the problems continue for more than 120 hours, we’ll offer you a minimum of 20 litres per day, per person.  

 

Bottled water deliveries

When there’s a longer or bigger impact to the water supply, and we’re not using other methods to supply water, our teams (or a third party delivery service called Water Direct) may deliver bottled water to homes without water.

We’ll always get in touch with anyone who’s on our Priority Services Register if they have a medical need for water (e.g. dialysis patients) to discuss what they need. So it’s possible that during some events, you may see bottled water being delivered but won’t get any yourself. 

 

It’s important to know that it can take a long time to get round to everyone with deliveries. , so even if we’ve let you know that we’ll be bringing you bottled water, we’d encourage anyone who’s able to, to make their own arrangements to pick up your own. We can’t directly reimburse anyone for buying their own supplies, but it’s important to know that compensation (under our Guaranteed Service Standards) will be paid to anyone where our pressure monitor records less than 3 metres head of pressure in the main supplying their home for more than 12 hours.

Some important things to know if we’ve let you know you’ll be getting a bottled water delivery: 

  • We’ll always prioritise customers on our Priority Services Register who have a medical need for water or those who are physically unable to get to a customer collection hub to collect bottled water. If you’re on the Priority Services Register and need to update us about your support needs, please call us on 0800 141 2934 anytime between 7am and 9pm Monday to Friday, and 7am and 8pm at the weekend. 
  • The delivery team will leave two packs of water per household in the first delivery based on an assumption of 2.4 people per household (we don’t hold any information about how many people actually live in each property). If you feel you need more than you’ve been given, please give us a call on 03457 145 145. 
  • They’ll knock on the door before leaving the packs. We’re really sorry, but due to the number of deliveries they often have to make, they can’t wait or help everyone in with the packs. If you have any kind of issue that means you can’t bring it inside by yourself, give our Priority Services team a call on 0800 141 2934 and they’ll arrange for someone to pop by to help. 
  • If we need to make our deliveries between 9pm and 7am, we won’t knock and disturb you but will leave it outside so it’s there for you in the morning.  
  • For apartment buildings, blocks of flats or multiple living spaces, they’ll leave the water at the main entrance. The packs can’t have individual names or addresses on due to data-protection. 

Bottled water hubs 
For large-scale events (and where we can find a suitable place), we’ll set up bottled water hubs. These are places where our team will have large amounts of bottled water for customers to drive up and collect packs to take home. 

Setting up a hub takes a lot of prep and organisation, but as soon as we have a location agreed we’ll email and text everyone we can, and update our website to let people know where to come and when.  


For anyone who can’t travel to the hub, friends and neighbours are free to collect on their behalf, or you can let us know you need us to bring some to you instead. 

Water tanks 
Water tanks are large containers of water filled by our tankers, for people to collect water from in their own containers e.g. empty bottles or clean buckets. These are only typically only needed in exceptional circumstances.  

It’s important to know that while the water inside the tank is perfectly safe to drink as our tankers fill them with treated water from one of our water treatment works. But because we can’t guarantee that the containers people bring along to fill are completely free of dirt and debris, we’d always advise that any water taken is always boiled and cooled before using for drinking. It’s perfectly fine to use for everything else. 

 

Find out more information in our FAQs below: