Water is essential to our daily lives, from a warm cup of tea in the morning to a relaxing shower at night. Water resources are in a healthy position after the winter rainfall.
However, this could change quickly depending on what kind of weather we experience this spring. To make sure there is enough water for future generations, we need to become ‘water-wise’ all year-round, not just in response to a heatwave.
You can find out more about this by clicking on the button below.
Simple swaps for big savings
We know weather has a massive impact on water resources and long range forecasts are uncertain for what the weather will be like later in the year.
So, by making simple changes, we can help protect our water resources, meet demand across spring and summer this year and you may be able to save some money too.
Updates about your water supply
The amount of water people use each day changes depending on the weather. We normally supply around 543 million litres of water a day. In the summer months, this can go up to over 600 million litres a day.
What we're doing to improve our network
To improve the resilience of the water supply network we are starting a six-month programme of engineering works. We’re also accelerating operational changes to the way in which supply interruptions are managed, to improve the experience of all customers, following recent outages. These will complement our longer-term investment plans to improve resilience across the network.
Reducing the Risk of Supply Interruption
The programme of engineering works includes:
- Improving water pipe and network connections, to maximise the flow of available water in the network from local drinking water storage tanks
- Reviewing the performance of Water Treatment Works and accelerating technical upgrades that were previously scheduled later in South East Water’s resilience programme
- Fast-tracking the investment installation of batteries at key sites to mitigate the impact of any power blips, particularly when hot weather or high demand periods drive power surges
- Installing additional temporary drinking water storage tanks at critical sites to provide additional treated water storage, increasing the volume of water available.
Together, these changes seek to improve resilience and the water supply by increasing the availability of water when customers and communities need it most – particularly during peak periods.
Improving Customer Experience
In the event of future water supply outages, we’re making changes to our operations which include the way we supply alternative water to customers. In particular, we’ll be looking at how we provide water to critical care sites including care homes, GP surgeries, and schools.
As part of this, we’re working closely with local resilience and community groups to ensure alternative water sources – including water tankers and bottled water stations – are in optimal locations to support the needs of local communities, and they have sufficient resources to maximise the volume of water when it is needed most.
To manage these resources, we’ll digitise our operations when stocking and delivering alternative water to customers. This will mean we’re more efficient in the way we respond to incidents and help make sure customers and communities can rely on us to maintain alternative supplies.
We also have lots of plans to improve our network in the future. These are set out in our business plan. You can read the plan here(opens in a new tab) or a summary of the plan here(opens in a new tab).
Reservoirs
Our biggest reservoirs in Sussex, Ardingly and Arlington, store up to 8,300 million litres of water and supply 8% of all the water we provide.
We also get water from boreholes and chalk aquifers.
Our reservoirs refill between October and April when there’s more rain. You can find out more about our reservoirs here.
On 10 October 2025, we applied for a Drought Order from the Secretary of State on the River Ouse.
We have applied for this order because we experienced extremely low rainfall last year, resulting in the water level at Ardingly Reservoir approaching critically low level.
Treatment and beyond
Once we collect water from the source, we treat it to make sure it’s safe to drink. We take great care over the quality of our water and constantly monitor our treatment process.
Once the water is treated, we send it to drinking water storage tanks around our region. These tanks connect to the pipes that deliver water to your tap.
This process can take several hours, and high water usage makes it harder for us to supply water to everyone. You can find out more about our processes here.
