Where does our surface water end up?

That was the question that Julie Parsons, our industrial water and trade effluent monitoring expert, asked when she joined the business last summer and decided to make it her task to find out.

Explains Julie: “Surface water, which is predominantly rain water, is something that we all have to pay for as businesses and personally as home owners since it usually ends up going down a drain or sewer.

“Water companies obviously need to charge for surface water to be transported and, in some cases, treated. After studying Detectronic’s water bills, I was curious to see if there were any savings to be made in this particular area.

“What I wanted to find out was how much of our surface water ended up going down the drain and how much of it actually ended up flowing directly into the River Colne directly behind our offices. Any of our surface water going into the river isn’t going through the local sewage treatment works so therefore we shouldn’t have to pay for it.

“We used a specially formulated drain tracing dye to trace water from the drains in our car park and identified which direction and therefore which manholes it passed through. We followed the coloured water through a series of manholes and drains in the waste ground behind our and our neighbour’s building and into the river below.”

Concludes Julie: “As a result of our exploration and targeted monitoring we discovered that 100% of our surface water does indeed drain directly into the River Colne and, as such, our water company has recalculated our surface water run off charges resulting in a saving of 62.4% on our total bill.”