Water Efficiency Improvements: A Good Place to Start
By Glenn Petherick
6 min read
Water conservation improvements are generally the least expensive and most cost-effective retrofit improvements that owners can make at their existing affordable multifamily rental housing properties to cut utility usage and costs, according to sources. Moreover, sometimes improvements can be funded with no upfront cost to owners.
“Toilets are the biggest thing that cause a lot of water usage and owners don’t realize that they’re losing water that way,” says executive Phil Neeves of Minol USA, a utility cost recovery company that offers multiple services, including evaluating water usage at apartment properties and installing efficiency improvements.
Aside from a shorter payback period than those for most energy or lighting improvements, tackling water conservation first usually makes sense for owners because most affordable housing renters don’t pay for water and sewer and because water rates historically only rise.
Most Effective Measures
According to sources, the most cost-effective and rewarding water conservation steps that can be made at existing affordable multifamily properties are installing more efficient flushing mechanisms in toilets, low-flow showerheads, and aerators in faucets in residents’ apartments. According to Neeves, the average total cost for all three under Minol USA’s program is about $55 per apartment.
Rebuilding rather than replacing the toilet, switching out some of the current equipment in the tank for a more efficient flushing mechanism can reduce a toilet’s water usage to 1.0 gallons per flush, says Neeves. Toilets typically use 2.8 or 3.6 gallons per flush.
Minol USA offers a service where it will conduct a free audit of an apartment property for water usage. As part of this, it gathers and analyzes a year’s worth of water and sewer bills and produces a report for the owner outlining recommended specific improvements to reduce water usage and costs. Projected reductions are usually 30-40 percent, says Neeves.
If the projected water reduction is 25% or greater the property is eligible for the company’s “pay-out-of-savings” program. Under this, Minol USA will pay for and install the equipment – a new toilet flushing mechanism, low-flow showerhead, and faucet aerators – at no upfront cost to the owner. The company gets repaid by the owner from the water cost savings (the dollar difference between the old and new utility company water bills) until Minol USA fully recovers its charge for the job. After this point the owner reaps the full benefits.
“It almost seems like it’s too good to be true; we run into that the whole time,” says Neeves. He said the average payback period is about 10 months.
If a property doesn’t qualify for the pay-out-of-savings program, Minol USA will sell the water conservation equipment to the owner, with a 7% price discount for cash payments.
For owners wishing to buy replacement toilets, Minol USA sells high-efficiency toilets. In addition, Neeves pointed out that some local water districts offer free toilets or rebates to defray the purchase price for new toilets. Some water districts have this information on their Web sites, he said.
National Church Residences Strategy
National Church Residences (NCR), a major developer/ owner/manager of affordable multifamily rental housing based in Columbus, Ohio, has used Minol USA’s pay-out-of-savings program for making water efficiency improvements at many of its properties, says Steve Bodkin,
senior vice president and chief operating officer.
NCR manages about 310 affordable rental properties containing 23,000 units located in 28 states. Most properties are restricted to senior residents and nearly all are federally assisted or low-income housing tax credit developments.
The nonprofit employs a strategic approach and standard procedures for tracking energy and water usage and costs at its properties and deciding which to retrofit and in what order. Most properties are master-metered for water usage. “We have very few properties where the residents pay their water bills,” says Bodkin.
NCR pays a company called Cass that continuously collects all of the utility bills for all of its properties. Cass inputs all the information on each bill into a database (e.g., name of property, bill amount and date, usage, rate). Cass forwards this information plus scanned copies of the bills to a second company called Ecova, which makes all the information and bills viewable online by NCR. The nonprofit can therefore view current and past utility usage levels and costs for each property and compare projects.
According to Bodkin, NCR has developed a standard metric that it uses to measure water usage at its properties, compare usage among projects, and prioritize the order of retrofits. This figure (gallons per person per year) is calculated by dividing the total annual water consumption at each property by the number of residents. Total consumption includes water usage for apartments, common areas, irrigation, etc.
NCR transfers this data to a bar chart or graph that lists all of the properties in descending order of water usage, from the largest number of gallons per person per year to the lowest. From this NCR identifies the properties with the highest per capita water consumption and then targets those above a certain threshold – somewhere around the top 20% – for water efficiency improvements. “Every year we re-run the graph and find out where the outliers are and go after those,” says Bodkin.
He said NCR then reviews the targeted properties to see if they have low-flow showerheads, low-flow sink aerators, and high-efficiency toilets in the apartments. If not, they are installed. “Most of the time we’re not changing out toilets,” says Bodkin. “We’re changing the flushing mechanism so the toilet doesn’t use as much water to flush.”
According to Bodkin, the payback period for these improvements has nearly always been one year or less. In cases where the payback period has been one year or less, water usage at the properties has been cut by an average of about 25%, he said.
According to Bodkin, in situations where the cost of the water conservation improvements are not repaid from the savings, in many cases the funding can come from a property’s reserves.
Ecova also uses an algorithm that compares the consumption level of all utilities at a property – for the current month, the previous month, and a year ago – and sends an email to the property manager and NCR’s main office when there is a spike in usage and asks for an explanation. According to Bodkin, this might signal, for example, a water leak somewhere that needs to be addressed or a constantly running toilet.
At NCR’s properties that are outliers because of high water usage for outdoor irrigation, the nonprofit works to identify a better way for doing irrigation.
In California, which has suffered from a severe drought, LINC Housing, a nonprofit affordable housing developer/owner/manager, is “looking at ways to zero scape or at least find more drought tolerant plants” for landscaping, says Hunter Johnson, president & CEO of the Long Beach-based nonprofit. He said most of LINC Housing’s properties are garden apartment developments with large lawn areas.
