Step #1 in any ‘water security’ strategy should be – Fix the leaks!
A new report from NZ’s Public Health Information Centre estimates that nationwide our municipal water systems leak on average about 22% of their water. Some localities, like Upper Hutt and South Wairarapa leak 40% plus. Wellington fixed nearly 4,000 leaks in 2024.
Comparable numbers for well-managed European systems would be 5% for the Netherlands and 6% for Germany.
Using a more sophisticated metric (Infrastructure Leakage Index – ILI), NZ rates (at 2.7) near the bottom of fifteen international jurisdictions – e.g., Denmark being 0.7). Hastings’ ILI is 4.8; Napier’s ILI is 4.2.
The health folks behind this report are concerned with leakage because leaks provide potential entry points for health-threatening contaminants. Havelock North residents know all about contaminants infiltrating their drinking water!
But there are also economic costs, which ultimately show up as higher rates. This report puts the waste of NZ public funds at around $122 million per year. Continuous leakage can potentially undermine the structural integrity of the water distribution infrastructure via soil erosion around pipes, destabilising them, and resulting in more significant and costly damages, with risks elevated in severe weather events, as we saw with Cyclone Gabrielle. And of course more water must be pumped through the system, with associated energy costs.
Critical to finding and addressing leaks is system-wide use of water meters, complemented by volume-based water charges (above a reasonable free basic level for household/human water needs. With such a scheme in place, water experts say as a ‘rule of thumb’ water savings of 20% can be achieved.
The report cites the recent experience of New Plymouth, where installation of water meters has allowed the district council to postpone a $4 million pump station upgrade. With meters installed for half the district, leaks of 463m3 have been identified and stopped. That’s about 68 Olympic swimming pools of savings per year. And, importantly, water demand dropped.
As BayBuzz reported here, Kāpiti Coast also achieved substantial water savings with the introduction of water metering. By installing meters, Kāpiti immediately identified 443 leaks in its infrastructure.Not only did Kāpiti reduce its volume of leaks by 90%, but the overall water usage in the district also dropped by 25%.
According to the Hawke’s Bay Regional Water Assessment, we use about 24 million cubic metres of water for reticulation systems serving our households, sportsgrounds, parks and industry. And as noted above, our Hastings and Napier water losses are well above the already excessively high NZ average.
So far our local politicians have parked water metering in the ‘too hard’ basket, although in past BayBuzz interviews our mayors have acknowledged both the leakage problem and the solution – water metering … with volume pricing.
Read what they have to say about water meters in our previous report, here. It’s time for our local officials to re-examine their priorities … a local election year is a good time for that re-think.
First ‘cab off the rank’ needs to be the water bottling firms (many foreign owned) who currently pay no charge for the millions of litres of HB water that they export each year. They don’t even pay the full costs of HBRC compliance monitoring of their water take. It time for a water levy per litre like the bottling firms currently pay in Fiji.
Glen,
There is no bottled water industry in New Zealand. It’s been destroyed by ignorant New Zealanders. Like any industry that consumes water, none pays for the water they extract from their own property. Still, over 50% of bottled water in NZ is from town supplies in NZ, and they pay standard commercial rates. They also pay taxes on wages, profits, and rates and provide jobs and also jobs for supporting industries. The bottled water industry provides more than 1,000 times the revenue of any other industry in New Zealand per ltr consumed. The bottled water industry produces almost no environmental impact as compared to any other industry. Now, if you say PET bottles are a problem, you are wrong, as PET bottles are the most recyclable media available. However, we do need governments to legislate that all packaging be recycled, and then there will be virtually no environmental impact. The loss to NZ bottled water exports is significant just because of ignorance.
Water is crucial to our existence – droughts appear to be coming quite frequently nowadays – irrigation takes a lot of water – so fixing the leaks would appear to be cost effective, savings effective, and plain common sense. So the ratepayers may have a small cost involved with water metering but it seems that there’s a savings in water retention and people seem to use less – so win-win? Certainly would seem to be worth a serious and urgent public discussion.
We all know that every summer we have water restrictions here in Hawkes Bay. Rates have increased 3 fold, so tell me if I’m only using half my water usage why do I still pay the same water charge?
Also what was the point in building and spending all that money on those 2 hideous water tanks in town.
My rates have tripled, and paying them on a single pension is extremely difficult.
I could I suppose put my tax break money of $2.00 towards them, that goes a long way.
The problem is also storage and/ or insufficient pumping power to keep the storage tanks at an acceptable level. Supposed to be building a storage facility on hospital hill on the old hospital site seems still at the design stage!! There is a constant supply of some of the purest water in the world under ground some quite near ground level as some floods the Maraenui golf course so there is no shortage of water and nature has filtered it .So what is going on at the water department ?
Water meters is the way to go. We pay for our water and you sure monitor how much you use. It’s also a way to detect a leak when your water bill goes from 50 bucks a month to 150. Much better than paying yet more rates where you don’t know where the money is going to