It's nothing compared to the ongoing leaks, Islington Tsunami or the Dartford Sinkhole.

Have a leak in putney. Started the 14th. Meant to be fixed by the 16th. I started filling buckets to water the local trees given Thames are doing sweet FA about it

And yet those beacons of greed, golf courses, still get watered.

Just ban Golf or at least propose it. I'm sure that things will start to move on the leak front once the news reaches the golf mad directors.

Carl I want you to kill all the golfers on the golf course

I understand that Datacenters would need to use water.... but I would have thought a mostly "closed loop" type approach would employed.... if anyone can explain or point to decent papers/articles I'd love to learn more.

I expect once you've used it to evaporative cool, it takes more energy to re-cool and extract it again, so they vent it ?

It takes around 500x more energy to boil water than it does to raise its temperature by 1°C. If you had a closed loop, you'd need to dump all that heat into the ground or, more likely, a river, which does crazy things to the ecosystem with even a small temperature rise. Throw some water vapour into the atmosphere and that energy will bleed back over several cubic kilometres as the water condenses. The water isn't boiling in an open loop but evaporation is pulling out the same energy.

Incidentally, the reverse of this is also how condensing boilers achieve such staggering efficiencies and why you shouldn't have the temperature of your central heating set too high (at the boiler, not the thermostat).

Condensing tumble driers (a) exist and (b) work fine.

The condensing dryer on my washer/dryer takes water from the mains and spits it out to the drain quite regularly during operation (I can hear the inlet valve opening/closing). Definitely not a closed system.

For both the above mentioned condensing dryers and the expensive type that use heat pumps, the aim isn't to dispose of waste heat, it is to transfer water from clothing to the drain. The water cooled type is indeed dumping heat down the drain but it's a lot less than a data centre and only intermittent. The heat pump type is only generating extra heat through inefficiencies in the system.

Condensing tumble driers (a) exist and (b) work fine.

I use an extremely efficient solar drier. Cost me a couple of eye hooks and some cord. Sure, it has some of the same drawbacks to solar PV, but it's a really cheap way to dry stuff.

Mine harnesses wind power *and* solar. I better get it to market pronto.

>I use an extremely efficient solar drier.

Did you get planning permission ?

From personal experience I dispute (b).

I've only ever found condensing tumble driers to be a terrible compromise between drying and putting a hole in your wall, a compromise that fails to effectively dry clothing even if you leave it running for hours. YMMV.

I would have thought this as well (Then again the nearest I have been to a proper data centre was over 10 years ago, currently just have a small closest with some racks), surely they would have to treat water through to ensure parts in the cooling system don't react or corode?

The water is used to spray on pipes/radiator matrix so that evaporation cools the closed loop chilled water.

Most ends up just disappearing as, well vapour........

Yup because I have only ever read about it, I am thinking it isn't well used.

How well would that work out when the unpurified water is contaminated by sewage ?

When it hits the fan?

s/liters/litres/g

-> Thames Water has itself faced criticism for wasting water due to leaks from ageing pipes, with its network losing almost a quarter of the water it supplies, said to be more than 600 million liters per day by some estimates.

The hosepipe bans are nabbing the lowest hanging fruit. Nosey neighbours who think they are doing something right will inform on people. Meanwhile the bosses of the water authorities get bonuses while not fixing the leaks. It's rather like politicians who bang on about "dodgy Dave the builder not paying tax" while ignoring the City of London and its institutionalised avoidance of tax.

"losing almost a quarter of the water it supplies".

Though, pedantically, it doesn't lose a quarter of the water it supplies, since the water is not delivered to the customer, and therefore isn't strictly supplied.

Also, while everyone likes to talk about water being lost, no one ever considers what happens to it.

While there are the rare occurrences of mains bursts that create holes in roads and flood properties, with the water then going into the surface water drainage system, most leakage seems to be true leaks from the supply pipes. Thus, most lost water is actually returned to the ground, entering the shallow aquifer if there is one, and thence flowing back into the local river and stream system, or simply adding moisture to the ground which can then be drawn up by plants.

While it is clearly not good that the pipes are leaking, this is the result of a network of supply pipes that are often in excess of 100 years old. It would be unreasonable and impractical to expect a century of under-investment to be made good over a period of a few years.

The regulator Ofwat sets maximum permissible leak losses; most of the UK's water companies (including I believe TW) meet those targets. I think Southern and South-western may be the exceptions that truly deserve to be criticised. Otherwise, the criticism should be on the regulator that sets the water loss targets, not the water companies that abide by the regulator's requirements

The issue isn't that it's lost - it's that the effort that went into making it drinkable is lost.

" it's that the effort that went into making it drinkable is lost. "

And there's a secondary concern - contamination of the supply via the breach in the pipe if the leaked water gets trapped around it (e.g. in heavy London clay).

Given that the water is under quite a high pressure, contamination is not a concern until you shut the valve off to fix the leak. Several bar usually, hence water spouts and blown roads in extreme cases.

I agree the real issue is the cost in terms of resources, other chemicals, energy used to treat it etc.

And to be fair when the pipes were installed there was no reason to think there would need to be ongoing maintenance. It's only in the last couple of years that anybody has discovered that old pipes leaks

They have had 33 years. At the current rate of progress, it will take them just under 2000 years to renew all their pipes.

In order the keep water bills down Ofwat prohibits water companies from fixing leaks if it is cheaper to simply let the water continue to leak, and the calculation is done per leak not per pipe section. So if an old Victorian pipe running under a field has 20 small leaks along it (but which adds up to a lot of water) it is unlikely to get fixed. You can look at leakage stats and see that every time Ofwat adjusts how much leakage is acceptable the amount of leakage in the network changes to match it (with some lag).

Bloody hell...

The raw numbers are usually presented without context - the proportion is frightening though.

"Thames Water has itself faced criticism for wasting water due to leaks from ageing pipes, with its network losing almost a quarter of the water it supplies, said to be more than 600 million liters per day by some estimates."

Everyone has to tighten the valves, except shareholders, no?

It's time that huge, disproportional payouts, bonuses and dividends are treated as embezzlement.

"Investors" certainly shouldn't be allowed to rack up huge debts, pay themselves large dividends, and leave behind what is then as unprofitable, debt-laden business.

It isn't limited to UK only:

[1][2]

Drought-stricken Holland discovers Microsoft data center slurped 84m liters of drinking water last year

[...]

Microsoft, and the municipality of Hollands-Kroon, had previously said the Middenmeer facility would only need 12m to 20m liters per year, but local news outlet Noordhollands Dagblad uncovered classified figures which revealed the site, where Microsoft runs multiple data centers, used 84 million liters

[3]

Megatechcorps would lie? Unbelievable, isn't it?

[1] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-holland-discovers-microsoft-data-center-slurped-84m-liters-of-drinking-water-last-year/

[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-holland-discovers-microsoft-data-center-slurped-84m-liters-of-drinking-water-last-year/

[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/drought-stricken-holland-discovers-microsoft-data-center-slurped-84m-liters-of-drinking-water-last-year/

You'd have thought that Microsoft of all companies would have plenty of Windows to open to let some heat out

... they could build the datacenters where there is both plentiful water, power and it's already bloody freezing

Joe Public won't put up with the latency on cat videos if they have to be served from within the Arctic circle..

MS has been experimenting with a DC that is underwater. The surrounding water is the perfect heat sink for the DC. The Pentland Firth is an ideal place for one as it has some of the strongest tides in the world.

They do. Look it up.

Only yesterday I was reading this-

https://capx.co/knee-jerk-nationalisers-have-no-idea-how-the-water-industry-actually-works/

capx.co Is that the Centre for Policy Studies, based out of Tufton Street, by any chance? Interesting indeed.

Y'know, like data centres get together and supply community heating systems? Duh.