Direct and indirect techniques are available to measure the water content of the cellulosic insulation of a power transformer. The measurement of the water content of cellulose is necessary because if it becomes too high, bubbles of water will be ejected from the cellulose insulation which may cause failure. Taking a sample of oil for Karl Fischer titration analysis is a simple and cheap laboratory based method to estimate the water content of the cellulosic insulation. However, it has been suggested in an IEEE Standard that errors of up to 200 % can be present. Due to a utility often operating a large number of power transformers, it is not practical to use better online methods (due to installation costs) or dielectric response (having to disconnect the unit) to monitor water content in a financially constrained economy. Therefore, a field study was performed to investigate how to improve the accuracy of determining the water content of paper using the traditional Karl Fischer titration method.