Aiming at the poor performance of timedelay estimator (TDE) under low signaltonoise ratio (SNR) of leakageinduced vibration signal in watersupply pipelines, the performance of six TDE (crosscorrelation, ROTH, SCOT, WIENER, PHAT and ML) for watersupply pipelines leakageinduced vibration signal was studied by combining simulation analysis with experimental verification. Firstly, the variation rule of six TDE with SNR is studied under different noise types. Then, the noise suppression performance of the TDE under different SNR is analyzed. Finally, six TDE are applied in leak location experiments of watersupply pipelines to analyze the relative errors of leak location caused by different TDE to compare their noise suppression performance. Simulation analysis and experimental verification show, the SCOT has the best performance in noise suppression and the average relative error of SCOT based leak location in watersupply pipelines is 348%, the Wiener has the worst performance and the average relative leak location error is 1823%.