Project Overview
For more than 20 years, Aureos has worked alongside Bristol Water to maintain the high-voltage electrical infrastructure that powers key water treatment and distribution facilities across the region.
Supporting approximately 40 sites, Aureos provides a comprehensive maintenance and engineering service that helps ensure essential water services remain operational. The electrical assets maintained under the contract form a vital part of the infrastructure responsible for pumping, treating and distributing water to communities across Bristol. As a result, reliability and rapid response are critical.
Sector:
Water
Region:
South West
Service:
High-voltage maintenance, asset management and emergency response services
Client:
Bristol Water
The long-standing relationship has seen Aureos become a trusted engineering partner, providing both routine maintenance and specialist technical support to help Bristol Water manage an increasingly ageing asset base.
Managing Ageing Infrastructure
One of the biggest challenges facing the network is the age of its electrical infrastructure. Many transformers and associated high-voltage assets are approaching 50 years of service, increasing the importance of proactive maintenance and condition monitoring.
To help Bristol Water manage this risk, Aureos carries out annual inspections, carrying out transformer oil analysis across the network. This allows engineers to assess the health of critical assets and identify signs of deterioration before failures occur.
By monitoring transformer condition year after year, Aureos provides valuable insight into asset performance and remaining service life. This information supports informed maintenance decisions, helps prioritise future investment and enables Bristol Water to take action before equipment reaches a critical condition.
Helping Critical Equipment Last Longer
Through its ongoing inspection programme, Aureos identified several transformers where insulating oil had significantly deteriorated over time.
Rather than waiting for failures to occur, Aureos recommended and delivered transformer oil replacement works across four sites. The work provided Bristol Water with a practical and cost-effective way to maintain reliability while developing longer-term plans to replace this ageing infrastructure.
Emergency Response
Alongside planned maintenance, Aureos provides a 24-hour emergency response service with a four-hour attendance target.
The electrical systems supported under the contract power infrastructure that is essential to Bristol's water network. If key pumping or treatment assets lose power, the impact can quickly become significant. In some cases, facilities only have a limited period of stored water capacity before supply resilience begins to reduce.
Aureos's engineering teams respond to faults, carry out investigations, make installations safe and work to restore operations as quickly as possible. In recent years the team has delivered numerous emergency call-outs, reactive repairs and high-voltage switching activities across the network, helping to minimise disruption and maintain operational continuity.
This rapid response capability provides Bristol Water with confidence that critical issues can be addressed quickly whenever they arise.
A Trusted Extension of the Client Team
Over the course of the contract, Aureos has provided more than maintenance services alone.
During periods when Bristol Water experienced shortages of qualified high-voltage personnel, Aureos supported day-to-day network operations by providing specialist engineering expertise, high-voltage switching support, isolation planning and technical guidance.
Working closely with the client's operational teams, Aureos helped maintain safe and reliable operations while internal capability was rebuilt. This collaborative approach strengthened the partnership and demonstrated Aureos' ability to provide both technical resource and strategic engineering support when required.
Delivering Long-Term Value
The Bristol Water contract demonstrates the value of combining proactive maintenance, condition monitoring and engineering expertise to support critical infrastructure.
For more than two decades, Aureos has helped Bristol Water safely operate and maintain a complex high-voltage network serving around 40 critical sites. Through proactive asset management, transformer life-extension programmes, emergency response services and specialist engineering support, Aureos continues to help keep Bristol's water infrastructure running reliably and helps make it more resilient for the future.