Be Wise About Water Use

Whether it’s used for cleaning, drinking or industrial processes, water usage is an essential function of any building. As such, inefficient use of this resource can be expensive and wasteful, as Georgia facility manager Peter Braun learned last year.

Braun, facility manager for WIKA Instrument Corporation in Lawrenceville, Ga., began implementing a water-conservation program in 2007 as Georgia found itself in the midst of a drought. Within a year, the company reduced its daily water usage from 60,000 gallons to just 18,000, saving around $7,200 per month in the process.

Much of WIKA’s water savings resulted from the installation of closed-loop “chiller” systems on the company’s soldering equipment, which uses re-circulated water to cool the instruments as opposed to a constant flow of “new” water as was typically used. But there are many other things that facility managers can do to use water resources more efficiently.

“There’s always other opportunities for us to look at ways we have been doing things, and improve,” Braun says.

If you are serious about reducing your water consumption, consider these tips:

1. Measure first. The first step in any water conservation program is to figure out how much water your building is currently using. “You can’t reduce it if you don’t measure it,” says Rick Orr, facilities manager at C-TEC, a technical school in Newark, Ohio. Gather several years’ worth of utility bills and analyze them. Not only will you have a good starting point, you’ll also become familiar with the facility’s month-to-month usage patterns and will be able to spot anomalies more easily.
2. Look into new technology. Increased awareness of “green” practices has brought about the development of many new water-saving fixtures. Some of these gadgets are simple and inexpensive, like faucet aerators, which reduce water flow without compromising pressure. Others, like waterless urinals, are a little pricier but still money-savers when you consider that they flush with no water at all. “I think we do very well with them,” says Orr, who installed 32 of the urinals on C-TEC’s campus. Braun put sensors on faucets in WIKA’s restrooms, which turn off the water whenever the user’s hands aren’t directly under it.
3. Retrofit old fixtures. No money in the budget for new stuff? Many older fixtures can be altered to make them more efficient. Orr says C-TEC’s campus has several older “fill and flush” toilets, which were built to constantly circulate new water—even when no one is using them. To solve that problem, Orr added occupancy sensors to the appropriate restrooms, which turned the toilets’ water valves on when the restroom was occupied and shut them off 10 minutes after the room became empty again. “That was one of our biggest cost-saving measures,” Orr says.
4. Make preventive maintenance a priority. Having a schedule for regular inspections of your building’s plumbing goes a long way toward preventing water waste by minimizing the chances of leaks. “Preventive maintenance is everything to me,” says Orr, who supervises four maintenance mechanics and 11 custodians. A conscientious maintenance staff also helps; plumbing problems in WIKA’s facility are always reported before they get out of hand. “If a faucet is dripping, it is reported right away,” says Braun.
5. Think outside the box. If you’re going for maximum efficiency in water use, consider more radical solutions. Braun says he is considering saving the water from his company’s rooftop air conditioners and putting it in an underground cistern to use for flushing toilets. Another option is to capture rainwater and use it for outdoor irrigation or for flushing—two situations where water doesn’t need to be of consumable quality. “There’s no sense in putting purified water in the toilet,” Orr says. And since rainwater is free, the planet and your budget will both thank you.