Water journey to your tap

Learn about the journey of getting water to you, from sourcing water to treatment and storage and finally distribution to the taps in your house.

Sourcing water

Depending on where you live, the water you drink out of your tap may come from Lake Taupō, a nearby river, spring or bore.

Water is allocated for household, business and industrial use through resource consents. These consents set rules for how much water can be taken, help make sure water is managed responsibly and ensures we have enough water for future generations.

In the Taupō District, consents for water are managed by Waikato Regional Council. We currently have around 30 resource consents that allow us take water from lakes, rivers, bores and other sources in the district.

Intake and screening

The long journey to get water to your tap starts in Lake Taupō for the majority of the district's population, including Taupō and nearby communities: Acacia Bay, Bonshaw Park, Wairakei Village, Waitahanui and Whakamoenga Point.

Water travels up an intake pipe extending 200m into the lake, through screens or strainers that remove sediment, stones and sticks and into the treatment plant for processing.

Treating water

Treatment plants are where the work takes place to make water safe for people to drink, because in nature or at its source, water is not always clean enough for people to drink.

Water is treated to comply with Drinking Water Quality Assurance Rules from the Water Services Authority – Taumata Arowai, the water services regulator for New Zealand.

While the way that water is treated across our 15 treatment plants is slightly different, to take into account the water source, the processes used are generally similar to those used at the Taupō Water Treatment Plant, as outlined below.

Water conditioning

The tank closest to the entrance contains aluminium chlorohydrate, which removes dirt, arsenic and other particles from the water.

The tank on the far side is hydrofluorosilicic acid, which provides the fluoride that is added to the water. Only a tiny amount goes into the water – 0.7 of a gram per cubic metre.

Reducing corrosion

These two tanks play an important role in protecting the network and quality of the water.

The first tank contains caustic soda, which is added into the water to make it less corrosive, so it does not damage taps and pipes as it travels through them.

The second tank holds liquid sodium hypochlorite, which is added to the water to sanitise it while it is being pumped through the network.

Membrane filtration

Membrane filtration (also known as ultrafiltration) removes any remaining particles in the water larger than 0.1 microns. A micron is one thousandth of a millimetre – so a particle has to be miniscule to get through this process.

This is where some of the most nasty particles are removed, including bacteria (e.g. E.coli) and protozoa (e.g. giardia and cryptosporridium).

Storage and distribution

After being treated there's still a lot of work to do to get water to your tap!

Water pumps

Powerful water pumps at treatment plants, and in pump stations, move treated water into reservoirs and across the wider network.

In some cases water needs to be pumped uphill so the pumps play a key role in distributing pressurised drinking water through 745km of pipes to get to your tap, via a reservoir.

Reservoirs

Treated drinking water is pumped and piped to 62 reservoirs for safe storage across the district.

Reservoirs are large storage tanks that hold hundreds of thousands of litres of treated drinking water. While the size and capacity of reservoirs vary across our network, they all play a critical role in ensuring continuity of water supply for communities. They also provide backup supplies during maintenance or outages on the network, and cater for firefighting and other wellbeing purposes.

Reservoir to tap

The long journey of water from the source, through treatment plants, pipes and reservoirs, and onto your property is finally complete when you turn on a tap - and you have clean and safe drinking water.

But while that water journey has come to an end, another is about to get started.

Once you've used the water and put it down a drain or sink (or flushed the toilet), that used water goes on a journey through another network of underground pipes to a wastewater treatment plant.