Water Savings in Business - How to Get Started

The first step of any water saving project is to do a water audit to determine where you use water and how often you use it. This will provide you with a greater understanding of your water use and the opportunities to reduce your water bill. You can do a water audit in four simple steps.

Step 1: Know your water consumption.
Obtain your water consumption history you can get this from your water bill. To get the best estimate of your water use, you should look at bills across a whole year or more. Look at your total use and your average daily use. This will help you understand any patterns in your water use and determine if there are periods of the year when your business uses more or less water.

Step 2: Document your fittings, fixtures and appliances.
Do a walk through of your business premises and identify the fittings, fixtures and appliances and how much water they use. You may be documenting things like the average flush volume of staff toilets, water flow rate of taps used for cleaning, average water use per dishwasher cycle, or average water use of cooling systems.

Step 3: Know your water-using activities.
Next write down all of the water-using activities of your business. Through this step you would do your best to estimate the number of times or the duration of water use. Let’s take a car yard for example. We might expect some water use at a car yard to include washing vehicles. You would estimate how many continuous minutes of washing with the hose running is undertaken in a week and average this to estimate a daily use. Combine this with other uses such as staff amenities to develop a water use profile for your business and compare it to your bill to check your estimate is about right.

*Step 4: Develop an action plan. *
The final step is to use the results of your audit to identify opportunities to reduce your water use. For our car yard example it could be as simple as using a trigger nozzle for car washing so the hose isn’t running while cars are being washed. Or perhaps installing a flush control device in a single flush toilet.

If you are a business looking to undertake water saving projects, contact Rous Water’s Demand Management Coordinator on 6621 8055.

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