water

Come on water companies put your hands in your pockets the UK is surrounded by water build some desalination plants

H

One already has..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Gateway_Water_Treatment_Works

and even if it did it would consume loads of power, so be expensive. It rains plenty in winter, so get some more reservoirs built, or install a water grid so that the vast amount of water in Kielder Dam can be shunted off down south (at a price of course!)

Edited By duncan webster on 12/08/2022 20:22:57

Duncan

A water grid is so logical and because of the changes in climate that are happening, the South East where I live is getting drier and rainfall seems to diminish year on year, the problem with a water grid is there are no immediate profits that would be available for all the shareholders so only government planning and direction would make it happen, with the current pantomime prevailing in our political system I can’t see that ever happening. Dave W

IIRC the Thames Water desalination plant was (at least partially) powered by electricity generated from gas derived from an adjacent sewerage treatment plant.

A late friend worked for Yorkshire Water. I asked him one time about the scheme to have a water grid using water from Keilder that was mooted after there were shortage problems previously. IIRC the scheme engineering was started but not completed due to concerns about moving different types of water borne creatures into areas where they were not naturally occuring. Mark has been gone some 15 years now, so the discussion took place quite some time ago.

Nigel B.

It seems crazy to have desal plant in a country famous for its rainy weather! They have one in South Australia but that is the driest state on the driest continent on Earth so makes more sense. They also have the world's biggest battery, charged by solar, there too so power costs and emissions are somewhat reduced.

If electricity can be generated from sewage gas (which it can) then using that lecky to drive a deal plant still costs the money you could have got from selling it to the grid.

Surely we can treat the water at source to get rid of the critters? Perhaps when we stop using gas we can use the gas grid to transport water? Don't hold your breath, it won't happen in my lifetime 

As its the SE that needs the water no doubt the money will be found unlike northern rail projects 

Edited By duncan webster on 12/08/2022 23:48:04

I used to work on the Ely - Ouse River transfer scheme where a network of pumping stations and pipes took excess water that would be lost to sea at the Wash at Denver Sluice, was transferred to reservoirs in Essex and from there potentially to London.

This completed in the early 1970s, maybe the government should have invested the money to expand this nationwide rather than waste it on HS2...

For interest there were 3 large pumps at one of the pumping stations, each capable of pumping approx 30 million gallons per day, driven by 11000 v motor, the water was extracted 200 ft down via a well fed from a tunnel several miles long that I think went under the runway at RAF mildenhall. The underground pipeline was almost big enough to walk upright and we sometimes had to do tunnel/pipe inspections on the rare occasions the system was drained.

Interesting job, I expect it is running 24/7 at the moment....

Regards

Derek

There is a slightly parallel scheme in Monmouthshire, that pumps water between the Rivers Usk and Wye.

My employer of the time picked up a speculative contract to supply the equipment to a team of biologists trying to find a safe way to steer fish away from the pumping-station intakes.

It was speculative because no-one knew if the experiment would work, or even if the particular fish species concerned would be active in the area at the time, for the time involved - I expect it was difficult to ask them.

We set up the equipment and left it with instructions including one that stressed it only needed switching it on and off - do not touch any of the settings!

Gave themselves away they did, when they tried moaning about our system not working or something. When we retrieved it there were muddy finger-prints on what had been clean value-setting push-buttons!.

I don't know if it occurred to them that perhaps the fish had not read the timetable so were simply not there as hoped!

.

There have been suggestions about using the canals for water-transfers, but this may have been thought not really very effective or practical.

But....
I don't have to cut the grass
There's water in my taps
I'm letting Anglian Water supply me - for which I pay them a handsome sum and leave them to manage it.
The only downside is the journalistic nonsense pumped out by the media who know lots about nothing.

What's the problem for townies?

Perhaps it is the case, especially in the south, of not too little water but rather too many people.

Much of it is recycled, even in the 1980s recycling was very common in London

On ships we used an enzyme/bacteria which was thrown into the sewerage tank and known scientifically as The jobbygobblers

I suppose if you filter it through sand etc then it becomes clean, then zap it with chlorine/ultraviolet it becomes pure but only guessing

Stuff like lead and poisonous chemicals etc would need to be checked for because they are not so obvious or simple

Edited By Ady1 on 13/08/2022 09:24:21

Rainfall has been unusually low in the UK this year, we have lots of leaky ancient pipework and not many new reservoirs have been built since Victorian times. Our water system works, but its been operated close to the limit for decades.

Hosepipe bans are the first warning sign that demand for water is exceeding supply. They're an easy way of telling people to be more careful, and the saving is often enough to avoid more brutal methods, like folk having to collect water from a stand-pipe in the street. I've lived in a country where the water was only turned on for a few hours of the day: it changes how you live!

The effect of a serious water shortage on townies is graphic: the sewage system stops working! The place stinks and everyone gets tummy bugs, including cholera.

Not all areas of the UK are effected equally: no water shortage were I live (yet). For cost reasons the network doesn't have much facility for bulk transfer between regions. The ideal is a large tunnel falling at 2 degrees from a high reservoir to low consumers, but geography rarely cooperates, and pumping soon costs more than the water! Nigel mentioned old canals as a possibility, but they're engineered flat, with locks, and a lot of pumping is needed to transfer water from one end to the other. Worth investigating, but not straightforward, even if a canal happens to be in the right place. Rivers are used as Nigel suggests because they flow and perhaps more could be done.

Having to build several large reservoirs somewhere in the UK and link them with a new national water grid is just one likely consequence of climate change. The tricky question is 'who pays'. I'm in favour of letting the costs lie where they fall. If consumers in East Anglia need to build a reservoir in South Wales and dig a tunnel across England to connect it, then consumers in East Anglia should pay for everything: compensation, land purchases, infrastructure and maintenance. Fortunately water supply is already privatised so there's no need for government to raid the magic money tree or upset voters by raising taxes...

Dave

Strange how at a previous time of national necessity, a fuel supply system was developed and actioned to feed RAF stations around the country. Thank heavens there were no private investors involved in that exercise. The need to save 10 minutes journey time between London and northern cities, as inferred in post No# - oh sorry, we still can't do that on this forum, - is crushed when it takes me milliseconds to have a face to face conversation with someone in the great metropolis electronically. Pity we can't do that with water.

Regards Ian.

There is already a country wide water distribution network in place which are called canals. Unfortunately nasty substances can get in to these as also has happens for many of our rivers so maybe not so good for drinking water but OK for providing grey water. We may have to bite the bullet and install dual white and grey water system for both delivery and sewerage.

CS

We may have to go back to medieval times for a solution to water problems, in the 1500’s when the city of Valletta was planned, it was I think the very earliest example of planning applied to a whole city, those who designed the layout required every building that was erected had to incorporate a cistern in its foundations to collect what little rain fell on the building. In those days Valletta was at risk of prolonged siege from those who wanted to prevail over the inhabitants. The provision of cisterns for storing water and large granary’s meant the city could survive. If we adopted the idea of cisterns to collect rainwater and the gray water from domestic tasks, washing up etc. we could use it for flushing our toilet systems and therefore save at least a third of the potable water which we currently draw from our water mains. Dave W

Leaks are a serious problem in the UK. Ofwat's# current targets include:

We have set companies stretching performance commitments to reduce leakage over the 2020-25 period and we expect them to adopt innovative approaches to deliver these reductions efficiently. By achieving these commitments, the sector will cut leakage by 16% by 2025. This will save enough water to meet the needs of everyone in Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield and Liverpool.

As we are only 2 years in to a 5 year programme described as stretching it's unlikely the target's been met yet, so we can assume the system is leaking enough water at the moment to supply Cardiff, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield and Liverpool five times over.

Fixing pipes is both low technology and cheaper than installing a dual potable/gray water system. The problem is the water companies aren't getting on with it. The problem is money...

Dave

# For the benefit on non-Brits, Ofwat is the Water Service Regulation Authority. It's one of about 100 organisations created by government to supervise ex-public services sold to the private sector. Their exact status varies: Ofwat is a Government department, ONR is a 'statutory independent corporation', and the North Sea Transition Authority is a private limited company where all the shares are wholly owned by the Secretary of State. I don't know why different arrangements are in place: it feels unnecessarily complicated.

The idea is that privatised utilities will be run more efficiently by businessmen than civil-servants and will be able to borrow commercial money for improvements rather than working within budgets raised by taxation. The regulator's job is to set targets and protect consumers. The system works OK when all is going well but there's a history of dropping the ball whenever a private firm messes up. Possibly it's unwise for governments to put agents in charge of functions when the government still carries the business risk, and making it hard to regain control when the fuses blow because largish in-house teams were replaced with a minimalist regulating office that doesn't have the manpower, skills or systems needed to actually run anything.

Samsaranda's comments about every house in Valletta incorporating a cistern triggered a memory for me. In the house in which I was raised as a child in Smethwick, there was a large cistern built in beneath the kitchen floor, fed by rainwater from the roof guttering. Ours was filled in many years ago, but the old lady in the house next door had kept hers. The water was pumped up by a magnificent cast iron hand pump - like a scaled down version of a village pump - and was situated next to a large, earthenware sink. She used it a lot, especially for washing and personal hygiene (only one sink in each house and no bathroom). She saved a fortune in soap, as mains water there was very hard, whilst the cistern water was soft. In all, there were eight houses in the terrace, built in about 1911. I certainly think that this is an idea well worth exploring again.

There are obvious pitfalls using rainwater unless filtered and tanks checked from mosquitos through legionnaires disease to acid rain and lead or copper roofing components?

pgk