Reducing Commercial Water Costs: Where Building Owners Should Look First

Water is often treated as a fixed operating expense. For many commercial properties, it shouldn't be.

Changes in consumption, leaks, aging fixtures, irrigation, operating conditions and water-management practices can all affect what a facility pays for water and sewer service. The challenge is determining where meaningful opportunities exist before investing in a solution.

Start With the Bill — But Don't Stop There

Utility bills provide a useful starting point for understanding how a property uses water. Reviewing historical consumption and cost can help identify changes in usage, seasonal patterns and unexpected increases that deserve further investigation.

But the bill only tells part of the story.

A meaningful commercial water efficiency evaluation should consider how water moves through the property, where it is consumed, whether abnormal usage is occurring and how the facility's operating characteristics may be contributing to unnecessary expense.

Look for the Sources of Avoidable Consumption

Opportunities can differ substantially from one building to another. Depending on the property, an evaluation may include:

• Plumbing fixtures and flow rates
• Leaks and abnormal consumption
• Irrigation and exterior water use
• Common-area and shared systems
• Submetering and usage visibility
• Incoming water conditions
• Water-management technologies
• The relationship between water consumption and sewer charges

The objective isn't simply to reduce water use wherever possible. It is to identify where changes can produce meaningful operational and financial results without negatively affecting building performance or the people who use the property.

Water and Sewer Costs Should Be Evaluated Together

In many facilities, reducing incoming metered water consumption can have an additional economic effect because sewer charges may also be calculated using incoming water usage.

That means the financial opportunity associated with a water-efficiency project may extend beyond the water portion of the utility bill.

Understanding the property's rate structure is therefore an important part of evaluating potential savings.

Technology Comes After the Evaluation

There are numerous products and technologies designed to address commercial water consumption. Some may offer meaningful benefits in the right application.

The technology, however, shouldn't be the starting point.

RMEG's approach is to first understand the building, its utility data and the underlying opportunity. Technologies can then be evaluated according to the facility's conditions, implementation requirements, expected savings and potential return on investment.

This helps move the conversation from:

Measure the Result

Efficiency improvements should ultimately be evaluated against actual performance.

Establishing baseline consumption before implementation creates a reference point for comparing future results. Post-installation utility data can then help determine whether the improvement is producing the expected outcome.

That process — understand the building, analyze the data, evaluate the opportunity, implement selectively and measure the result — turns water conservation into a building-performance decision rather than simply a sustainability initiative.