By Aisha Bello-Dambatta
Measuring water use is a first step and a key component of good practice water management. It is the key to understanding and assessing if your water use is reasonable and appropriate for your business. Regular monitoring of your water use will provide accurate and reliable information to help inform you of any needed intervention or investment.
In order to understand your water consumption, it is important that water use data is collected regularly to help identify any changes in water use, leakage, unauthorised water use, or other wastage. This information is available on your water bills (in m3) and on water meters.
Water meters should be read regularly, at least monthly or quarterly, to allow for a detailed understanding of water use, monitoring of water use, and for ensuring the accuracy of your billing. It will sometimes be necessary to focus on a shorter period of consumption (e.g. a week) if you suspect a problem like leakage (from internal pipes and fittings, for example) or water use inefficiency. Metering data can also be used to encourage and incentivise water efficiency and has the potential to generate large and cost-effective reductions in water, water-related energy use, associated emissions, and costs by providing information of consumption over time.
Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and smart meters provide more regular readings and can be used to record water use throughout the day. This information can be used to better understand your water consumption profile, including peaks and baseline flows.
Building Management Systems (BMS) can be used to automate the monitoring and/or control your water use. Water meters with pulsed outputs can easily be connected to BMS which can be used to measure, monitor, and control water use in real-time, even remotely.
A key step in reducing water use is to monitor consumption over time. The aim of this is to help understand how much water is used in your business and can be used to develop a water demand profile which is a useful measure of consumption over time and can highlight changes in water use that may not otherwise be obvious. You can develop a water demand profile by identifying the total volume of water use (m3) using water bills or meter readings. You will need at least a whole year of data, and ideally, a minimum of three years data should be used for this. You can calculate your average daily consumption by dividing the number of your annual (or quarterly) business opening days by your annual (or quarterly) consumption.
A water balance model can be used to better understand the water use, sewerage discharge, and trade effluent of your business. This is a numerical accounting of how water enters your business, how it is used, and how it is disposed of. This is done by mapping water flows through your business using information available on water bills, sewerage and trade effluent discharge, meter readings, and business audits to ensure all water using fittings and appliances are accounted for.
Monitoring data can also be used to benchmark your water use against industry standards can help you to assess your performance. You can benchmark your water use either per floor area (m2) or per occupancy, depending on the size of your business and the occupancy of your buildings. You will need at least a full year consumption data (m3/year) to benchmark accurately. Where a full year’s data is not available, you can use quarterly data to benchmark your water use in litres per day (L/day).
A water efficiency action plan can be used to improve the water and energy performance of your business. This should be based on business-specific and on a case-by-case basis and contain your water management goals and targets and the actions/indicators that can help you achieve them. This can include, for example, including water efficiency in your energy management plan and having a target to reduce your carbon footprint by a set percentage through water efficiency within a set time period.
