5 Although this rise can be generally attributed to an increase in diurnal consumption owing to people remaining at home, increase in preventive behaviours such as hand-washing 1 also became contributory factors. In Brazil, analysis of data from 26 days pre-lockdown and 26 during lockdown has revealed an 11% increase in household water consumption attributable to the lockdown. 3 In a Waterwise 4 report, certain regions in the UK saw a 35% increase in peak daily consumption during the lockdown. For example, in Germany, a significant shift in aggregate demand peak was observed from 07:10 pre-lockdown to 09:40 during lockdown. 2 Studies dedicated to the impact of COVID-19 on water consumption focused on aggregate demand and general demand peaks. 1 Globally, the lockdown has caused households to change their typical consumption behaviours drastically across a variety of major categories, resulting in an initial sharp increase in spending, especially in essentials and food items. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had its first confirmed case in the United Kingdom in late January 2020, but transmission increased rapidly leading to the government imposing a lockdown on the whole population, banning all “non-essential” travel and contact with people outside one’s home on 23 March 2020. The implications of the study to urban water demand forecasting strategies are discussed, along with proposed future research directions. Our results highlight those groupings with the highest and lowest impact on water demand across the network, revealing a significant quantifiable change in water consumption patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown period. We present a data-driven household water consumer segmentation characterising households’ unique consumption patterns and we demonstrate how the understanding of the impact of these patterns of behaviour on network demand during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown can improve the accuracy of demand forecasting. We analysed water consumption data from 11,528 households over 20 weeks from January 2020, revealing clusters of households with distinctive temporal patterns. The COVID-19 lockdown has instigated significant changes in household behaviours across a variety of categories including water consumption, which in the south and east regions of England is at an all-time high.
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