Case Study: United Utilities improves CCTV pipe inspection accuracy and efficiency with VAPAR

How we’ve worked with one of the world’s largest water companies to improve their CCTV inspection process and align our results to UK water standards

United Utilities, one of the UK’s largest water companies, manages a wastewater network of 78,000 km and reviews more than 500 km of CCTV pipe footage each year. The company needed a faster, more consistent way to assess sewer and drainage pipe conditions, centralize inspection data, and reduce delays caused by a manual, subjective review process. VAPAR’s AI-powered cloud platform for automated pipe CCTV inspection was used to address this challenge.

Through United Utilities’ Innovation Lab, VAPAR helped prove the accuracy of AI models for CCTV pipe inspections, improve those models over time, and align them to UK water standards. The two organizations then continued working together on trials, documentation, training, and a pathway to business-as-usual implementation, with benefits including time savings versus manual review, standardized defect classification, and shorter turnaround times for surveys. VAPAR’s collaboration with United Utilities also helped drive broader industry interest in software accreditation for water-sector inspections.

United Utilities

Kieran Brocklebank

Innovation Manager