Residential water consumption data shows average household water consumption sat at 181 kilolitres per year in 2018 compared to 191 kilolitres per year in 2008.

Water Pressure: The future of water security in the Hunter Valley

By comparison, Sydney residents used 215 kilolitres per year, Central Coast residents used 169 kilolitres per year and Melbourne residents used 151 kilolitres per year in 2018.

Merewether resident Peter Stevens believes the key to reducing water consumption is changing community attitudes to the value of water in everyday life.

"I think we take water for granted, we take rain for granted," he said.

"We have inherited the idea that it should rain once a month, quite nice soft romantic rain landing gently on the landscape producing mangos and bananas that we love. In reality that's not the physical condition of the most arid continent on earth. We have to do things very differently here.

"We should be leading the world in the way we manage water from the top of catchment to the urban areas and back again."

But he points out that governments have an equal role to play in helping individuals and organisations reduce their water consumption.

As an example he recalls his attempt to put a rainwater tank on his house as part of repairs done following the 1989 earthquake.

"We sought to be somewhat independent for water for the garden, toilet and washing vehicles. We were knocked back by all of the authorities, the council and Hunter Water. If I was to go through the same exercise now I would be required to install water tanks, and sensibly so," he said.

Independent water scientist Dr Peter Coombs said the Hunter, which was the first area in Australia to have user-pays water pricing introduced about 40 years, had traditionally embraced water recycling initiatives.

However, he said governments were no longer promoting water efficiency projects to the extent they were 20 years ago.

"Since the Millenium drought, which affected the (Lower)Hunter less than other regions, we have gone backwards from promoting water efficiency and recycling wherever we can," he said.

"There's probably nowhere near as much diversity in those whole of society type solutions going on. That would certainly be the case in the Hunter."

The other part of the Hunter's water consumption equation is the quantity of water consumed by non-residential customers, which make up only five per cent of Hunter Water's total customer base, but consume almost a third of the region's total potable water supply.

This figure includes 45 customers, which Hunter Water declined to identify, that consume 30 million litres of water a year.

"Through our water efficiency program, we have identified more than 282 million litres of water savings this financial year alone, which is equivalent to the yearly water usage of 1500 households in the region. It's estimated that our customers have saved $700,000 in the same period," a Hunter Water spokeswoman said.

The project has involved installing real time monitoring devices on large customers' water meters to better understand water demand patterns.

"This is vital for managing the network and forecasting when future upgrades may be required. In turn, our large customers will be able to identify ways to reduce their water consumption, find operational improvements, save on costs and also benefit the environment by reducing waste," the spokeswoman said.

City of Newcastle chief executive Jeremy Bath said the council had closely reviewed how it used water across its multiple operations across the city.

"When it comes to using water there aren't a lot of other choices," he said.

"The real choice now is actually about whether we can harvest water and we are doing that with grey water and creek maintenance and also really challenging ourselves in terms of getting the frequency right in terms of the watering that we are doing of our parks and gardens."

Professor of Sustainability at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney, Cynthia Mitchell believes the evolution of water conservation technology would help further drive down domestic and industrial water consumption.

"The reason why it makes sense to focus on the conservation side is because that's the cheapest thing to do. If we've got a limited amount of resources that we want to be expending on public services and we don't need [water] new supplies we can spend that money on new schools or new hospitals.

"There are all sorts of clever technologies coming through now in the water efficiency space. We just did a report last year with Caroma around bathrooms of the future. Clever things like soil moisture sensing - when you know you have got a really hot day coming, and with climate change we know we are going to have more of those, you pre-water.

"If you pre-water, particularly outside, then you improve the heat that people experience on that really hot day, you reduce the need to increase the size of infrastructure. There's all sorts of things you can do to manage the peak to keep the costs of infrastructure down."

Dr Coombs said it was frustrating that governments waited for droughts to proactively encourage investment water conservation initiatives.

"We don't tend to do it when we are not in drought," he said.

"We go through this hydro-psychosis; we wait until we have almost run out of water in cities and then all sorts of government grants come out to encourage water efficiency, things like rainwater harvesting and stormwater harvesting. Then as soon as the dam levels go back up and the emergency is over we get rid of it. Water authorities have, for the most part, got rid of their water efficiency teams and it goes back to getting a return on selling water."

"We lose the investment we have in droughts. This has been a characteristic of the Australian Water Industry compared to others around the world."