Monitoring and managing our supplies

Drinking water in the South West is mainly taken out of rivers and our 23 reservoirs. A lot of these reservoirs are small, serving local catchments, and are supported by the three larger reservoirs (what we call our strategic reservoirs) - Colliford, Roadford and Wimbleball.

Water from these three strategic reservoirs is shared between a lot of the smaller reservoirs, which is why making sure Colliford, Roadford and Wimbleball are nice and full is so important. 

So whether your local reservoir is brim-full of water, we're encouraging everyone to use water wisely.

Our five largest reservoir storage levels

What we're doing behind the scenes

Over the past two decades we have been working hard to secure supplies through:

• Reducing leakage by 40% since privitisation
• Increasing reservoir storage by converting former clay pits into reservoirs
• Improving our ability to move water around the region by upgrading pumping stations, pipes and valves
• Increasing the capacity of our water treatment works by upgrading treatment processes and technology
• Using less water in our treatment processes, for example, we recycle water for jobs onsite, like cleaning screens at our wastewater treatment works
• Investing in pump storage schemes at Wimbleball and Colliford to improve resilience by taking advantage of high river levels.

Improvements we've made between 2022 and 2023

During the hosepipe ban, we were busy increasing the resilience of our water network to help better secure our water resources for the future. These are just some of the improvements we made during that time.