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Water Savings 101: Top 10 Tips for Commercial Buildings
As the hurricane season begins to bring torrential downpours from Texas through the Southeast and up to the mid-Atlantic states, it makes folks forget that wide swaths of the country are still suffering through persistent drought and low levels of water supply. While agriculture, power generation and other industrial uses account for a large portion of water consumption in the U.S., the built environment is responsible for a significant portion. Outdoor water use accounts for nearly 30 percent of the 26 billion gallons of water used in the U.S. Indoor water use both for domestic water and heating and cooling makes up the other 70 percent; a statistic to which every commercial building in the country contributes. Needless to say, facility managers can have a tremendous impact on water use and water conservation.
Fortunately, many water savings opportunities are low cost or no cost. None of them are rocket science, and the vast majority can be handled in house. What follows below is my top 10 list of no-cost and low-cost strategies for reducing water use both in and outside your buildings. If you are doing some of these already — great! If you are doing them all, you're far ahead of the game and congratulations on the efforts. If you're doing nothing yet, you'll appreciate the minimal financial cost associated with these ideas. So, without further ado …
Tommy Linstroth's Top 10 Water Saving Tips for Commercial Buildings
1. Separately meter your irrigation
As simple as this sounds, I've been to way too many commercial buildings that do not submeter their irrigation. This is important for two reasons: First, if you don't know how much water you are using for irrigation, how can you measure your savings? Having that baseline water consumption will allow you to not only track your savings,
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water saving 101
Tommy:
Thank you for your article on great water saving tips.
All these tips assume water usage.
What about using no water?
I am talking about using artificial grass in place of real grass. Real grass requires water forever, harmful pesticides and fertilizers that eventually run into our streams and harmful emissions from the mowers. It is estimated that to keep grass green, 624 gallons of water are needed for roughly 1000 square feet of grass. That's a lot of water! Also it is estimated that the emissions from a lawnmower operating for just 30 minutes equates to a car driving 175 miles! The best quality artificial grass is porous which allows rainwater to pass right through. This option then is both eco-friendly and gives the property green grass year round!
Keith Greenwood
Earth-Friendly Grass AGL
Top 10 Tips
Mr Linstroth has it a bit wrong! "Changing the flush valve" on a flushometer toilet is NOT a "minimal charge" as he states. In fact, to achieve a good performance when reducing flush volumes down to as low as Mr. Linstroth proposes (20% less than 1.6 gallons - the HET threshold, by the way), it is nearly imperative that the bowl be replaced and the valve converted to a matching flush volume (possibly a diaphragm replacement, but not usually that simple). With low flush volumes like 1.2 gallons, it is important that the valve and bowl be hydraulically matched. Randomly "mixing and matching" bowls and valves from different manufacturers without consideration of hydraulics can make the flush performance quite unsatisfactory.
It is for the above reasons that we have been performing MaP (Maximum Performance) testing on all types of fixtures and fixture combinations since 1993. I suggest that readers consult this website BEFORE they run off and try to reduce flushometer toilet water use with the quick and easy methods.
www.cuwcc.org/maptesting.lasso
John Koeller, Technical Advisor
California Urban Water Conservation Council
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