Detecting leakage where no immediate obvious solution is available, typically city centre locations, congested highways or locations with particular specific engineering difficulty, repairs can be expensive to undertake requiring significant resources, disruption to customers and can take a long time to resolve. Currently repair team spend significant excavation leakage detection holes provided by normal detection methods. NGN wish to test and develop a new approach to leakage detection by combining new leakage detection technologies with road coring and vacuum excavation techniques.

Vacuum Excavation and road coring have not gained GB wide HAUC approval and therefore NGN have no current remit to use this technology within its region footprint.

Benefits

The project is expected to develop new learning in the area of:

• Specialist leakage location, developing a different ethos around location of difficult to detect escapes by combining techniques, technologies and tooling to reducing location time and pinpointing failures 
   
• Advancing the networks knowledge on dealing with difficult to locate escapes exposing failures quickly allowing new planning approaches to be developed that avoids a fire fighting approach low level leakage
   
• Identify key opportunities for deploying coring and repair techniques to first time failure resolution following acoustic pinpointing. How combining technologies under a single trial can increase benefits over and above single trial approaches
   
• How learning from one network can speed up the initial kick off project within another network to reduce costs to customer.