Public supplies of drinking water in Tayside and Fife have been given a clean bill of health.
The report said particular hotspots for discolouration were the Laurencekirk and Brechin areas supplied from Whitehillocks water treatment works (WTW) and the Dunfermline and Cowdenbeath areas supplied from Glendevon WTW.
Scottish Water has started mains rehabilitation works in the Whitehillocks area to address issues there.
Nationally, about one in seven complaints were about tastes and odours, with chlorine taste the most common.
More than 320,000 tests on samples taken from consumers’ taps, storage reservoirs and water treatment works were carried out by Scottish Water, with 99.83% of those from taps meeting standards. Consumer satisfaction also rose.
A spokesman said: “It is very important that the water tastes and looks good too. It is comforting to see the number of complaints to Scottish Water reduce.”
The regulator believes this figure will fall further through work being done to renovate old iron water mains and improve control of chlorine at some treatment works.
About 150,000 people in Scotland get their water from private supplies, which often have little or no treatment. The main risk this poses is from micro-|organisms such as E. coli.
The regulator said the quality of these supplies remained a concern, with 18.35% of samples tested during 2010 by local authorities containing the bacteria.
Tests on supplies in Perth and Kinross, Fife and Angus found higher levels of failure than in public supplies.
Upland parts of Perth and Kinross account for most private supplies in the region and 346 samples out of more than 4500 had problems, including coliforms and traces of metals.
The regulator’s spokesman said: “Local authorities across Scotland are working hard to communicate to the owners and users the health risk these private supplies pose, and offer support to make improvements.”
Out of more than 29,000 samples tested last year, just 43 failed to meet the required standard, Scotland’s drinking water quality regulator reports.
However, tests on private supplies, mainly in rural areas, showed a higher failure rate.
The figures were revealed in a report which showed national water quality is the best it has ever been, with well over 99% of public supplies complying with strict standards.
A spokesman said: “We are delighted with these results that show Scottish tap water is top quality. Households can be confident that the drinking water from their tap has been tested thousands of times each year, and that it meets some of the tightest quality standards in the world.”
More than 12,000 samples from public water supplies in Perth and Kinross were tested, with just 20 failures. Nine of these were for the presence of coliform bacteria and three for the metal manganese.
There were more than 8000 tests in Fife with only 10 failures, seven of these for coliforms.
The bacteria also accounted for four out of nine failures among 5000 tests in Angus.
Around 3000 tests were done in Dundee with only four failures, three for coliforms.
The regulator said that across the whole of north-east Scotland more than 4400 customers complained about water quality during the year, a rise of 12% on the previous year. Two-thirds of the complaints were about discolouration of water, which is rarely harmful.
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