Smart Non-Residential Water Audits
Through this program we are helping businesses identify water savings and make achieve big savings in their bills. The payback time is often short and motivational to implementation.
In partnership with BMT and REIDenvironmental, we have a project team that each has over 15 years of experience in water use analysis. This team has been assembled to ensure only the highest expertise and experience is available to meet the requirements of businesses seeking rapid, large and achievable water savings.
If you would like to organise some Smart Water Audits contact us here
Challenges and opportunities
Efficient water management is a hidden challenge for many businesses, as by nature water is easily lost and wasted without obvious clues. Though there are many common retrofits, technologies and activities that can reduce consumption, it is difficult for most sites to identify where to target actions and investment to achieve the most impact and return on investment.
Since much of the country is facing drought conditions with urgent needs to reduce water consumption where possible we have developed this service to provide pragmatic and prioritised advice.
- We look to identify the largest possible water savings that can be actioned quickly and with minimal financial burden on local businesses
- We identify non-essential water end uses that could be temporarily paused with lower relative impact on local businesses compared to truly essential water uses
- We take a productive and collaborative approach that builds strategic relationships between councils / water utilities and large water using businesses.
Detailed water audits
Effective investigation of water use can identify remarkable opportunities to make significant savings (often as much as 30-60% of total water use) – and with a very strong return on investment (simple payback periods under 1-2 years). However finding and targeting these opportunities effectively requires a high standard of investigation and analysis done to a sufficient level of depth and detail for each site. This is especially the case for larger and more complex sites, which are typically dynamic and unique in many ways from other ‘similar’ facilities.
The ideal case for maximising water efficiency improvements and benefits to businesses is a full detailed water efficiency audit. There are no conventions or industry standards to define the depth or detail of a water audit, so consultants must make a judgement as to what is necessary to find the best opportunities. For large users we believe it is necessary to apply enough rigour to quantify where and how water is being used across the site – a detailed breakup of water consumption. This can be done through site investigation, meetings with site staff, flow data gathering (with data loggers on water meters or from site systems), analysis of available information and careful extrapolation where required.
Quantifying the key end uses throughout the site enables expected savings to estimate reliably, and for the opportunities to be targeted to maximise savings while minimising cost and disruption.
A key intangible advantage of a detailed water audit is that it allows significant engagement with key site stakeholders. Combined with the detailed recommendations and business case analysis this makes it much more likely that site staff will support and implement the recommendations. This deeper level of assistance can also solidify the relationship between a customer and a water utility or Council.
Lower detail investigations
Acknowledging the potentially significant cost and longer time frame needed for detailed water audits, lower detail investigations can also be an effective tool. These enable rapid engagement across a large number of sites and can identify obvious opportunities and opportunities where a business case is not necessary for investing in improvements.
They can also help to assess the potential for more significant savings from more detailed work at a later stage, allowing targeting of efforts and investment towards the sites which are more likely to provide strong savings.
Implementation support
When water savings are required urgently, it can be valuable to provide additional support to local businesses to ensure there are no barriers to actioning and achieving the savings.
This can include:
- Immediately actioning minor repairs and improvements with a dedicated plumber. This has been found to be highly effective for leaks and simple retrofits – as discussed in Section 4.5.1.
- Additional engagement with meetings or presentations. This can assist in building internal organisational support for more significant changes on more complicated sites.
- Supporting staff in refining an internal business case or implementation plan through on-call advice or proactive driving of the process.
- Supporting or managing the implementation process directly.
- For more complicated opportunities it can be valuable to have assistance available to follow up and provide additional advice and support as required.
If you would like to enquire about offering Smart Water Audits to large water users in your area contact us here
If you would like to enquire about having a Smart Water Audit undertaken for your business contact us here
Tamworth Regional Council
We have recently undertaken some Smart Water Audits with Tamworth Regional Council uncovering some areas for great water savings.
