Smart Home Retrofits

Replacing taps, toilets and showers in homes

Smart home retrofits is a domestic plumbing service that ensures each participating home is leak free and has efficient taps, toilets and showers.

All water efficient products selected for this service are top rated Water Efficiency Labelling Scheme products. The set of standards that underpin WELS ensure that the products we use not only save water, but perform at least as well as the inefficient products they replace.

Participating households will typically have a choice between several 4-star water efficient showers, then 4-star flow regulators will be installed in bathroom sinks and 3-star flow regulators will be installed in kitchen sinks. All leaking or worn (difficult to operate) taps will be fully serviced and reassembled with all new seals and o-rings.

4-star showerheads are relatively new and as such will deliver savings beyond that which even newly built BASIX compliant homes would achieve.

In Sydney, this service has consistently delivered 20.9KL / year / household in savings for up to 8 years before the savings began to degrade.

In rural towns some new variables need to be considered:

• Metering is potentially very poor, due to aged meters that are irregularly read. We would recommend a statistically valid sample of participant and non-participant homes are provided with new meters prior to a Waterfix service being recommended
• Water pressure is potentially lower than the standard pressure that most WELS accredited showers are tested to perform at. The critical threshold is a static supply pressure of 150kPa. Static supply pressures below this would be considered for low pressure 3-star showers and in these cases post installation flow tests would be conducted to ensure at least 8.5 litres/ minute was flowing through the showerhead.