A trial with Cumbria County Council saw our engineers fill in local potholes during a mains replacement scheme in Appleby-in-Westmorland. At the same time, water contractors repaired a damaged valve.

Under normal circumstances, three separate road closures would have been required to achieve the same outcome.

We are now talking with Cumbria County Council about the potential to expand the scheme, and have also had a productive initial conversation with North Yorkshire County Council about the approach.

In 2014/15, we became the first UK energy distributor to join the Considerate Constructors’ Scheme (CCS) – a benchmarking programme recognised as the ‘gold standard’ in civil engineering.

Our involvement has continued to drive up work site improvements. For example, we have introduced defibrillators across a number of our sites, use eco-cabins – some are even solar powered ­- and have even begun harvesting rainwater to clean muddy work boots!

When water gets into the gas network it can cause low pressure or loss of supply for customers.

We’ve developed a small syphon, fitted with a remote monitoring system, which collects water in pipes, and lets us know when it is full.

We’re in the process of rolling out this technology across the network and sharing the knowledge from field trials with other gas distribution networks.

We are triallling use of a robot that can travel down our pipes to spot and fix faults.

The robot is able to transmit live footage back to the surface and apply ‘flexspray’ to seal damaged internal pipe joints.

As well as improving our asset management techniques, sending the robot inside our pipes is reducing the time it takes us to complete our jobs, from an average of three weeks down to just one, meaning we’re digging fewer holes, creating less spoil and reducing costs. It’s also improving safety by minimising the need to dig.

Doing a job right first time avoids the need to dig up the road again in the future.

Using a smart phone app, our front line teams can now send photos and other key information back to base, at every stage of a job. The info is then reviewed, in real time.

Following successful trials, the app is being rolled out to all emergency response, repair and connections teams in 2016/17.

And the use of digital technology doesn’t end there. We’re now in the second year of using smart phones to document and externally verify every single pipe joint we weld, ensuring a perfect seal every time, and have begun using digital job packs for mains replacement work – meaning more time improving our network, and less time back in the office.

Why dig a great big hole when you can take a small sliver from the road instead?

That’s exactly what our Core and Vac units do. The engineering equivalent of giant apple corers, the units allow us to get straight to the problem area of a pipe with a minimum of mess, fuss and time.

Following successful trials, we invested in two Core & Vac units in 2016. They mean we can often get a job done in a single day, and can reduce reinstatement costs by an average of 69% and duration of works reduced by half, providing a better value service for customers.

They don’t work for every job. But when they are deployed, the benefits are phenomenal, with smaller, speedier and cheaper roadworks.

When water finds its way into our pipes, our customers end up going without gas until we can remove it.  We’re constantly looking at new ways to locate and extract water more quickly.

Water often travels around our pipes as a vapour, so we’re repurposing 20 year-old portable sensors to help us find it. The sensors were originally used to measure the energy (calorific) value of gas, but their happy knack of measuring water vapour concentrations too means we can put them to a whole new use.

We’re also trialling ‘intelligent’ syphons that can extract water on low lying parts of our network, and new filters that can remove impurities from extracted water– avoiding the need to tanker it away.

All this clever technology is helping us turn the tide on water ingress.

At any given time, we have around 80 mini diggers working across our network.

Until recently, the use of ‘back blades’ to anchor each digger during operation caused scarring on roads and footpaths. Engineers would often have to return weeks later to rectify this cosmetic damage, at great cost.

We’ve developed a protector for these back blades, using NIA (Network Innovation Allowance) funding, that has performed extremely well in trials.

We now plan to retrofit the protector to all our diggers – reducing public disruption and unlocking expected cost savings of £300k per year.

Over the past two years, we’ve successfully trialled ‘core & vac’technology, which allows us to take a small, circular sliver from a road or pavement, instead of digging a much bigger hole.

The technique – the civil engineering equivalent of keyhole surgery – has proven its worth in reducing the duration and disruption of jobs, as well as going some way towards limiting the amount of spoil we send to landfill.

We’ve recently invested in two core & vac rigs, housed on specially adapted trucks making this a business as usual approach.

We invested wisely in our above and below ground equipment in 2015/16, putting money into sites at Wakefield, Darlington, Hull and Goole, among other places. This improved reliability and met the needs of expanding local populations.

For the past three years, we have pursued a policy of front loading our network investment programme, in order to target problematic, leak prone pipes as quickly as possible, reducing disruption further down the line, and saving money by avoiding continual repairs.