Across the UK, water companies are under growing pressure to help households use less water. On paper, carrying out home water audits sounds like the perfect answer – a simple way to spot inefficiencies, replace fittings and encourage behavioural change. But even the most well-designed audit programmes face practical limits.  If we’re serious about meeting Ofwat and DEFRA targets, we need a dual approach:

1. Make every audit visit deliver maximum value, and
2. Reach the millions of properties we simply won’t get to through audits alone.

But in practice? The picture looks very different.

1. Access and Time: The First Big Hurdles

Audits require engineers to gain access to each home – and anyone who’s ever tried scheduling appointments with busy customers knows that’s no easy task. Even post-COVID, when more people work from home, coordinating visits is time-consuming and expensive.

Once inside, audits can take far longer than expected. Every property is different, and identifying and installing water-saving fittings isn’t always straightforward. What begins as a quick check can become a full afternoon of troubleshooting. Audits do deliver benefits but they’re not quick, cheap or universally accessible.

2. Customer Willingness (and Aesthetic Concerns)

Many homeowners are reluctant to have fittings changed. They worry about the look of new taps or showerheads, whether they’ll fit, or simply prefer not to have anyone ‘messing with’ their plumbing. Access to pipework may be limited, or compatibility with existing fixtures poor, all adding friction to what should be a simple improvement. This means that even well-planned audits don’t always yield the expected savings.

3. Installation Risks and Responsibility

Even with experienced engineers, any intervention carries risk. Replacing tap inserts or cistern valves can lead to leaks, cracked fittings or damaged seals. When something goes wrong, it raises questions: who pays for repairs? Who’s liable for maintenance? And if the homeowner later removes the installed equipment – as often happens – those water savings vanish overnight.

4. Cost vs. Benefit

For water companies balancing tight budgets with ambitious PCC reduction targets, home audits alone are a slow, expensive route to scale. They’re essential but they can’t realistically reach every property and they rely heavily on customer cooperation and behaviour.

That’s why the conversation isn’t about replacing audits but strengthening them. And complementing them with technology that delivers guaranteed savings regardless of customer behaviour.

5. The Simpler Way Forward: Adding Guaranteed ROI to Every Audit (and Reaching the Homes you Can’t)

This is where LoFlo®, Groundbreaker’s passive flow management device, comes in. Installed externally at the meter point, LoFlo® regulates the flow of water into a property, maintaining a healthy flow rate whilst reducing the volume of water used. Because it sits outside the home, it avoids those barriers that might make audits more complex.

LoFlo® is:

• Installed at the property boundary – no additional property access needed.
• Able to be fitted at the same time as a meter exchange to reduce repeat visits (and cost).
• Low cost, quick to fit, and requires virtually zero maintenance.
• Owned by the water company, with a clear line of demarcation for maintenance and liability.
• Tamper-proof and virtually invisible when installed, with a lifespan of 15 years.

In short, it delivers guaranteed, long-term water efficiency – without the complexity, cost, or customer disruption of traditional home audits.

In short: audits deliver value but LoFlo® ensures you get guaranteed, long-term savings whether the audit goes perfectly, partially or not at all.

6. Time to Rethink Our Approach

Home audits will continue to play an important roll in customer engagement and targeted intervention. But to meet the scale of the challenge, water companies need solutions that work with their existing programmes, not against them.

LoFlo® strengthens the return on every home audit, while also delivering water efficiency to the many households that audits will never reach.

It’s about enabling you to do more, reach more and save more, without asking the customer to change a thing. If you’d like to talk about how LoFlo® could help your audits work harder, please get in touch.