Abstract
The COVID-19 lockdown has instigated significant changes in household behaviours across a variety of categories including water consumption, which in the south and east regions of England is at an all-time high. We analysed water consumption data from 11,528 households over 20 weeks from January 2020, revealing clusters of households with distinctive temporal patterns. We present a data-driven household water consumer segmentation characterising households’ unique consumption patterns and we demonstrate how the understanding of the impact of these patterns of behaviour on network demand during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown can improve the accuracy of demand forecasting. Our results highlight those groupings with the highest and lowest impact on water demand across the network, revealing a significant quantifiable change in water consumption patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The implications of the study to urban water demand forecasting strategies are discussed, along with proposed future research directions.
Highlights
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had its first confirmed case in the United Kingdom in late January 2020, but transmission increased rapidly leading to the government imposing a lockdown on the whole population, banning all “non-essential” travel and contact with people outside one’s home on 23 March 2020.1 Globally, the lockdown has caused households to change their typical consumption behaviours drastically across a variety of major categories, resulting in an initial sharp increase in spending, especially in essentials and food items.[2]
Studies dedicated to the impact of COVID-19 on water consumption focused on aggregate demand and general demand peaks
By presenting a data-driven detailed characterisation of household clusters, including their unique patterns, we have demonstrated how the understanding of the impact of these unique patterns of behaviour on network demand can help in the design of demand forecasting and intervention that targets households on the basis of their shared cluster characteristics
Summary
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had its first confirmed case in the United Kingdom in late January 2020, but transmission increased rapidly leading to the government imposing a lockdown on the whole population, banning all “non-essential” travel and contact with people outside one’s home on 23 March 2020.1 Globally, the lockdown has caused households to change their typical consumption behaviours drastically across a variety of major categories, resulting in an initial sharp increase in spending, especially in essentials and food items.[2]. Many demand strategies have relied on existing socioeconomic (SE) and sociodemographic (SD) household variables (e.g., ACORN9) and self-reported behaviours through surveys and water use diaries.[10,11] Our work significantly enhances the precision of forecasting and intervention when enriched with SE and SD variables, and provides a scalable framework for the inclusion of ordinary-metered and unmeasured households that share SE/SD characteristics peculiar to particular clusters. As the aim of this study was to quantify the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on aggregate water demand while highlighting household clusters’ underpinning temporal demand patterns, only anonymised smart meter data was utilised. Consumption remained even between the first week of January (J1) and the first week of February (F1) averaging 350 m3/d (291 l/h/d), followed by a 20% decline in
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