Keeping the water flowing

As the water supplier for the North West it's our job to ensure you have a constant supply of safe, clean drinking water delivered to your tap every day.

To help us achieve this we use water from a number of sources including reservoirs, rivers and boreholes across the North West.

We constantly monitor water levels in all our reservoirs, and levels go up and down depending on two factors - rainfall and our customers' demand for water. The percentage figure shown on our home page is an average based upon current water levels in 131 of our key reservoirs.

In times of low rainfall, our reservoir levels will obviously fall (if you live close to one of our reservoirs you'll often see the level change throughout the year). During the summer months, our reservoir levels will normally be lower due to reduced rainfall and increased demand (hot weather normally results in more water being used in the garden), while in the winter months our reservoir levels will be higher due to more rain and reduced demand.

Monitoring reservoir levels is also important for us if we are to react quickly to periods of drier weather. We work closely with the Environment Agency to ensure that, should our reservoir levels fall dramatically, we can put into action a number of measures to limit environmental impacts and secure public water supplies. Such steps will include transferring water supplies around the region, altering our abstraction rates from reservoirs to balance supplies and increasing our use of rivers and boreholes, and in more extreme cases, imposing restrictions on our customers' water use.  We have not imposed a hosepipe ban in the North West since 1996. 

Climate change is bringing its own challenges for us as a water company. That is why we are undertaking a major construction project to build a new pipeline across the North West from Merseyside to Manchester. This £125 million scheme will help us to more easily move water around the region to better meet future demands, balanced with our available resources.  Find out more information about the West East Link Pipeline project