Circle Case study

Acorn enables Affinity Water to understand water demand

Modelling Water Demand with Acorn

Affinity Water is the largest water-only supplier in the UK, committed to delivering a high-quality water service to all their customers. Their vision is to be the UK’s leading community-focused water company, providing 950 million litres of water each day to over 78,000 non-household connections and 1.4 million homes.

Why Affinity Water Chose Acorn

Acorn was chosen as it provided an easy way to apply insight to our customer base. Being a postcode level product, meant it was easy for us to apply to our customer base ourselves and has been invaluable in providing insight into how and why different groups have different patterns of water usage, enabling us to tailor our communications accordingly.

Using Acorn has allowed us to get a far better understanding of water demand across different Acorn Groups allowing Affinity Water to better serve our customers in a variety of ways; from reducing leakage, helping with water saving programmes and tailoring messaging to different groups.

How Affinity Water Use Acorn

Affinity Water use Acorn to model the demand for water in unmetered households. Acorn is combined into Affinity Water’s models to allow for a more nuanced understanding of different household’s demand for water. This understanding enables Affinity to identify local irregularities to quickly identify and respond to leaks ensuring targets for water use reduction are met.

Using Acorn has enabled Affinity Water to understand how different households’ demand for water changes on an hourly basis. This has helped them design water saving programmes by understanding how different groups would react to water saving programmes as well as being a factor in re-designing their bills.

Additionally, Affinity have also been able to model the increase in demand due to Covid so they can engage with regulators about increased water usage.

The Benefits

  1. Predictive factor in building models to understand water usage
  2. Models help support leakage calculations
  3. Help design water saving programmes with nuanced messaging for different Acorn Groups
  4. Allows the flexibility for scenario planning such as increased household water demand due to Covid

Further Information

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