Thames Water and Severn Trent Water are still use dowsing rods to detect leaks despite scientific studies showing that the method is ineffective.
A 2017 investigation found that were regularly using water dowsing to detect leaks, that regulators should step in to stop the practice of “witchcraft” at customers’ cost.
91av has now found that, more than five years later, most of the 19 companies we asked say they have officially abandoned the practice. However, Thames Water and Severn Trent Water both confirmed that their engineers still use dowsing rods.
Advertisement
at Thames Water says dowsing rods are regularly used to find leaks, as well as to “narrow down” or verify results from other leak-detecting equipment.
“Some people they work for, some people they don’t. If they work for you, you come to trust it,” he says. “People are sceptical of it, and I was sceptical when I first saw it. I started using them because I saw someone else use them and I have found leaks. ”
While these two companies still use dowsing, 15 firms told 91av that they no longer do, including Anglian Water, Dŵr Cymru (Welsh Water), Hafren Dyfrdwy, Northumbrian Water, South West Water, Southern Water, United Utilities Water, Wessex Water, Affinity Water, Bristol Water, Portsmouth Water, South East Water, SES Water, Northern Ireland Water and Scottish Water. Yorkshire Water and South Staffs Water didn’t respond.
Dowsing is a scientifically discredited technique that has been used over centuries to search for ground water, precious minerals, metals and other objects. Dowsers use two rods or a single Y-shaped rod and walk around an area, watching for tiny movements that they say indicate a finding. But experiments have shown that .
at Goldsmiths, University of London, says the belief that dowsing is an effective method has continued despite many double-blind laboratory experiments showing that it doesn’t work.
“It’s down to the ideomotor effect, which is a posh way of saying they’re moving the dowsing rods without realising it, with unconscious muscular movements,” he says. “There are a number of other related phenomena; it’s the same thing with ouija boards.”
at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, says that although studies have shown that dowsing doesn’t work in laboratory tests, he would hesitate to say it is impossible that they could work in some fashion in the real world.
“It’s possible experienced dowsers are picking up cues in the environment unconsciously, and then the rods are an indication of that. So you realise that certain plants look particularly green, or you’ve got certain plants growing in particular places, and maybe there’s water underneath,” he says. “What we know is that they’re not detecting water directly, because all the lab tests have shown that they will just fail.”
