Tips on reducing water consumption at a multifamily community

• In existing buildings: Water the landscape early in the morning or when the sun goes down.

• Perform proper maintenance of the sprinkler system. Often times, sprinklers are watering sidewalks.

• Deploy smart irrigation controls. When there is rain, the sprinklers shouldn’t turn on. They should operate on sensors and not timers.

• Use drought tolerant plants.

• Educate the contractors and residents to look for the leaks and report them. Make sure everybody is engaged. One drip a second can cost the property $30-35 or more a year.

• Retrofit all the mechanics and porcelain inside toilets with the lowest possible flush rates to do the job.

• Fix aerators to fixtures, which reduce water flow from 2.5 gallon a minute to .5 gallon a minute. Reduce consumption by using this add-on device. Do the same with showerheads.

• Educate residents; make an event out of it informing them. Make it fun.

• Use EPA water sense products.

• Benchmark your consumption.

• For new construction: Be sensitive to the area in which you are building. Be far sighted about the future availability of water. Get the most water efficient technologies. Go to equipment manufacturers and ask them to bring them to you. Often times, they will install one at their own cost in the hope of selling hundreds. You can test it that way and get feedback.

• Engage your local water provider in what you are doing-they can help you in design of systems, speccing of equipment, and often times there might be incentives and rebates available for water conservation.

• Think global, holistic, outside the box. Think about dual plumbing systems. Reuse water!

• Engage the right contractors; integrate them into your plan to be more water conscious.

• Adjust pool temperatures downward–to about 78 degrees. When it’s higher, water evaporates faster.

• While talking about water consumption convert cubic feet to gallons, which is a unit of measurement that everyone can understand and relate. Right now, water bills run in cubic feet and a lot of people may not understand what that really is.

• Have common laundry rooms. In-unit laundry washers use an average of 11,810 gallons of water annually; equipment in common-area laundry rooms uses an average of 3,595 gallons a year per apartment. This is a 3.3 to one ratio

Source: www.multihousingnews.com