Did You Know?

Longford County Council produces over 14.5 million litres of water each day! The water is collected at source and treated to ensure that drinking water supplied to our customers meets all EU and National water quality standards. Maintaining pipelines and water treatment plants requires vigilant surveillance and expertise - you may never have considered this before, but by the time your water reaches you over 20 people will have been involved at some stage in ensuring the supply and its quality.

Water is distributed to over 25,000 people in Longford travelling over 1,000km of pipeline and taken from eight different sources:

  • Lough Forbes
  • Abbeyshrule
  • Newtowncashel
  • Kenagh
  • Lanesboro
  • Lough Gowna
  • Lough Corbeagh
  • Lough Kinale

Each day we transport 14,500 tonnes of water from our production plants, through our pipeline network to our customers. If we didn't have the pipeline network we would need a fleet of 700 lorries to accomplish this feat by road!

With our annual water production currently at over 5 million cubic metres we could create a lake the size of the pitch at Croke Park with a depth of 445 metres! That's over 12 times the height of the new stand!

The electric pumps at our treatment plant use circa 14,35kWs of electricity daily, leaving us with a monthly bill of approximately €30,000.00.

Electrical costs are the main expense in water production. Our average monthly electricity bill for Lough Forbes alone is approximately €11,000.00. The pumps used to pump treated water from the treatment works to the main reservoir have a power rating of 160kW (this is equivalent to 80 x 2kW electric fires!). These pumps are normally working for 22 hours per day.

UFW (unaccounted for water) is currently estimated at approximately 45% of total demand. A proportion of this is due to insufficient metering and customer consumption data, but much is due to leakage. Metering will be instrumental in helping us to source leaks and conserve water levels.

We fix roughly 150 bursts every year. Many of the bursts that occur do not come to the surface; they disappear into porous underlying ground. Bursts like are detected by vigilant monitoring of water flows and the use of high tech apparatus - such as acoustic imaging equipment

We have two repair crews in operation and one full-time water inspector

Do you know what is in your water? The following document will help answer your queries: What’s in your water?