A water company has hunted down buildings with wrong plumbing.

Southern Water has found 60 properties with plumbing that sends waste directly to surface water drains instead of sewers.

According to the company, which covers much of Sussex, careless developers and tradespeople can wrongly connect home or workplace waste pipes, meaning waste goes into the wrong drains instead of being carried away to sewage treatment works.

The specialist misconnections investigation team identified 60 properties with incorrect plumbing over the last year.

Southern Water said that these investigations have prevented millions of litres of raw sewage from entering the environment.

In total, the team found 265 individual issues, involving problem toilets, showers, hand basins, dishwashers, washing machines, baths, and kitchen sinks.

Most of the properties were fixed by the owner after they were made aware, but in some cases Southern Water had to step in to take direct action, particularly when the connection was off property boundaries.

Over the past year, eight misconnected properties were identified in Sussex.

Since January 2019, when the team was set up, 224 misconnected properties have been found, with 739 individual problems, including more than 100 offending toilets.

As a result, more than seven million litres of household waste has been removed from the environment.

A single toilet can discharge more than 20,000 litres a year.

Rob Butson, misconnections manager at Southern Water, said: “When the team started work, the only way to track misconnections was by placing cages in drains to look for evidence of toilet paper.

"But the teams are now issued with electronic testing devices which measure tell-tale chemical traces of wrongly connected facilities allowing more to be found and investigations to be quicker.

“Bringing new technology to the task of tracking down these sources of pollution is truly game changing. Each time a connection is rerouted, pollution is instantly cut, improving bathing water quality and protecting wildlife and habitats.”

According to Southern Water, this is just one part of its ongoing efforts to protect the environment.

A spokesman said: “We are investing £2 billion between 2020 and 2025 to improve our performance, with much of that being spent on our wastewater network.”