Good practices

Canal de Isabel II Gestión (Spain)is particularly interested in Non Revenue Water (NRW). A great effort has been recently devoted to determine the breakdown of NRW into four different aspects: under-registration of water meters, non-metered connections, leakage and fraud. The studies have led to the conclusion that the first factor accounts for 55% of the total amount. The improvement programme that the company started has resulted in the following conclusions:

• Under-metering in the company is much smaller than expected. There is no particular reason to support this, since all the estimates of the other components of the NRW breakdown seem to match quite well.
• The estimation of the under-metering volume is fairly good, but it is not easily recoverable due to our residential customer demand pattern in relation to meter sizes.
• The meter replacement policy carried out was not adequate, and must be reviewed.

Sharing this information in the Hamburg workshop has been very useful, since it has allowed the company to know how other companies are dealing with this problem and how the legal framework is like in other countries. This will help to take advantage of these experiences and apply them in order to know how much NRW can be reduced and how to achieve it.

Under investigation