Service quality

A young girl collects clean water from a communal water supply in Kawempe, Uganda.
Many of the 3.5 billion people having access to piped water receive a poor or very poor quality
of service, especially in developing countries where about 80% of the world population lives.
Water supply service quality has many dimensions: continuity; water quality; pressure; and the
degree of responsiveness of service providers to customer complaints.

Continuity of supply
Continuity of water supply is taken for granted in most developed countries, but is a severe
problem in many developing countries, where sometimes water is only provided for a few hours
every day or a few days a week. It is estimated that about half of the population of developing
countries receives water on an intermittent basis.

Water quality
Drinking water quality has a micro-biological and a physico-chemical dimension. There are
thousands of parameters of water quality. In public water supply systems water should, at a
minimum, be disinfectedmost commonly through the use of chlorination or the use of ultra
violet lightor it may need to undergo treatment, especially in the case of surface water. For
more details, please see the separate entries on water quality, water treatment and drinking water.

Water pressure

1880s model of pumping engine, in Herne Bay Museum

Water pressures vary in different locations of a distribution system. Water mains below the street
may operate at higher pressures, with a pressure reducer located at each point where the water
enters a building or a house. In poorly managed systems, water pressure can be so low as to
result only in a trickle of water or so high that it leads to damage to plumbing fixtures and waste
of water. Pressure in an urban water system is typically maintained either by a pressurised water
tank serving an urban area, by pumping the water up into a water tower and relying on gravity to
maintain a constant pressure in the system or solely by pumps at the water treatment plant and
repeater pumping stations.
Typical UK pressures are 45 bar (60-70 PSI) for an urban supply.[citation needed] However, some
people can get over eight bars or below one bar. A single iron main pipe may cross a deep valley,
it will have the same nominal pressure, however each consumer will get a bit more or less
because of the hydrostatic pressure (about 1 bar/10 m height). So people at the bottom of a 100foot (30 m) hill will get about 3 bars more than those at the top.
The effective pressure also varies because of the pressure loss due to supply resistance even for
the same static pressure. An urban consumer may have 5 metres of 15 mm lead pipe running
from the iron main, so the kitchen tap flow will be fairly unrestricted, so high flow. A rural
consumer may have a kilometre of rusted and limed 22 mm iron pipe, so their kitchen tap flow
will be small.