Water companies are in the middle of the biggest metering programme this country has ever run. Under AMP8, £1.7 billion is being spent installing or upgrading 10 million smart meters across England by 2030 – roughly 2.8 million brand new installs and 7.7 million upgrades to existing ones. Engineers are on doorsteps and at boundary boxes thousands of times a day, every week, across every region.

And in most of those visits, that’s where it stops. The meter goes in, the engineer moves on and an opportunity that was sitting right there, at the same access point, in the same few minutes, goes with it.

A few extra minutes, not a second visit

NRv2 LoFlo® is a flow regulator that screws in between the meter and the manifold. No excavation, no specialist tools, no separate appointment needed. If an engineer already has that boundary box open to fit or exchange a meter, adding LoFlo takes a few extra minutes on a job that’s already scoped and already paid for.

That’s really the practical case for doing this. It gets rid of the most expensive words in any large infrastructure programme: ‘second visit.’ Whenever an efficiency measure has to be scheduled separately from routine meter work, you end up paying for it twice – once in engineer time, once in disruption to the customer. Doing both at once means one visit, one disruption, one line in the budget instead of two.

That alone would be a reasonable argument. What makes it a stronger one is the data now backing it up.

What the numbers actually show

Severn Trent is rolling out LoFlo across its network under an AMP8 framework agreement running from 2025 to 2028, chosen through competitive tender partly because of Groundbreaker’s ability to deliver at the scale AMP8 requires. The results so far are measurable: an average per capita consumption reduction of 4.67% a year across the programme, holding steady regardless of pressure zone, property type or how the people living there actually behave.

That last part is one of the most important bits. Many efficiency measures rely on someone doing something differently – shorter showers, fewer dishwasher loads, remembering to fix a dripping tap. Behaviour change is hard to measure and even harder to sustain and the savings tend to get picked apart the moment consumption dips for some unrelated reason: a mild summer, a change in energy prices, the school holidays. LoFlo doesn’t need any of that. It’s a physical, certified device with a known performance characteristic and it works regardless of human behaviour.

That difference is important – and probably more, not less, given what’s happening to the regulatory landscape itself. Ofwat is in the process of being replaced by a new, single integrated regulator, following the Cunliffe review’s call for a fundamental reset of how the sector is held to account. Whatever that new regulator ends up looking like day to day, one thing seems very unlikely to change: the appetite for evidence companies can actually stand behind. ‘We installed X devices with a certified efficiency of Y, across Z properties’ holds up to that kind of scrutiny in a way ‘we ran a campaign and consumption dipped’ never quite does.

The window won’t stay open forever

The AMP8 smart meter rollout won’t stay open forever. Once a property has its meter, the easy, low-friction chance to fit LoFlo at the same time closes with it. Going back for it later means a separate visit – separately scoped, separately costed, separately justified to whoever’s signing off the programme budget. In practice, a lot of those second visits just don’t happen, not because anyone decided efficiency wasn’t worth pursuing, but because it’s harder to build a business case for a stand-alone visit than it is to add five minutes to a job that’s already underway.

Which is really the point of all this. None of that makes the decision to do it complicated. Water companies still need to build the business case, run the tender, satisfy procurement – that’s real work and it should be thorough. But the underlying logic doesn’t need to be complicated to justify all of that: a small, proven operational addition to an existing job, repeated across millions of properties, adds up to a demand reduction programme that actually shifts the numbers, rather than one that reads well in a strategy document.

Most water companies aren’t short of ambition on demand reduction. What’s often missing is a low-friction way to turn access they’re already paying for into a saving they can actually report. Fitting LoFlo at the point of meter exchange is about as close as the sector currently has to that.

Find out more about how NRv2 LoFlo® fits into smart meter rollout programmes, or get in touch to talk through what it could look like across your network.