When most building professionals, facility managers, architects, and other professionals discuss building management systems (BMS), they immediately go to efficiencies in HVAC. Over the past decade, technological innovations have expanded this to include electrical distribution, energy efficiency, access control, security, and other areas.
However, not much has been said about the solutions for water management in a building. Optimizing the water flow in your office building, university, or other structure is vital to conserving water, protecting your building, and, most importantly, saving lives. This blog post looks at BMS for water safety and conservation.
What’s inside this blog post:
- Water consumes energy—lots of it.
- Unchecked water leaks damage buildings.
- Guarding against waterborne pathogens in your building.
Water consumes energy—lots of it
The delivery and disposal of water is a large-scale industrial process, accounting for about 13% of all electrical use in the US. Almost every action involving water delivery and its treatment afterward requires energy.
- Water is extracted from the ground table using electrically driven pumps. Water acquired from lakes and streams has cheaper acquisition costs, but more is involved in purifying it for human consumption.
- The system delivers water to treatment facilities and then on to the consumer, which is often a long journey, and it frequently has to be pumped to facilitate its movement along the way.
- Used water becomes sewage. The treatment of that sewage requires more energy.
- Add all this together, and every cubic meter of water consumed generates about 23 pounds of carbon emissions, according to WaterWorld Magazine.
- Here’s another astounding statistic: Facility Executive Magazine reports that more than 25% of the water entering a building is wasted. You read that right—25%.
The Solution: BMS provides smart water consumption tracking
BMS allows facilities managers and their staff to monitor commercial building water efficiency. This is accomplished through the strategic placement of sensors that track water usage. When correctly positioned, the readouts of these sensors allow facilities management staff to isolate the general location of a leak–to a specific floor or even a suite of offices.
Often the leak is almost unnoticeable but can have a sizeable impact. A leaky toilet, for instance, can be as subtle as a small trickle running into the rim of the water in the bowl. According to the City of Daytona Beach website, an average leaky toilet accounts for about 200 gallons of water a day, or 6,000 gallons a year. Add to that another industry average: 2% to 4% of toilets in a commercial building leak. That’s a lot of water going straight to sewage.
Leaky toilets are common, but they are no rival to other systems in a building. A leak in the cooling tower of a highrise can easily account for millions of gallons of water per year.
Unchecked water leaks damage buildings
Risk & Insurance, a website covering the risk management and commercial insurance industry, reports that, “Water damage is one of the most common causes of property loss and it is one of the most costly with annual incurred loss amounts in the United States related to weather and non-weather water damage equal to $500 million …” The Hartford reports that 75% of water-related damages come from plumbing, HVAC, and other sources that leak water. Among the areas in a building that are damaged are critical areas, including data centers, utility rooms, and utility infrastructure.
Leaking water has destructive effects on the skeletons of buildings. Water can, over time, erode concrete and infiltrate into the steel infrastructure where it rusts rebar and girders. The partial collapse of a 12-story condominium building in Surfside, FL, in June 2021 was linked to poor construction that allowed water to permeate the concrete. More than ninety people died when the building collapsed. The damage is done quietly unless you happen to notice the steady loss of water through your building management system.
Guarding against building damage
The same sensors that detect wasted water help isolate the potential for water damage. BMS can alert managers to leaks, temperature and humidity monitoring, freezing pipes, or mold exposures. Facility management staff can avoid much larger problems through this early detection.
Building owners can realize savings in insurance costs, too. The Harford also reported that many insurance companies are attaching separate water damage deductibles as high as $100,000. By incorporating leak detection measures into a building’s BMS, owners are in a better position to negotiate premiums and deductibles.
Guarding against waterborne pathogens in your building
Water trapped in stagnant warm water in pipes serving unused or rarely used parts of a building (such as empty office space) can eventually facilitate the growth of naturally occurring pathogens. The most infamous and surprisingly common of these is legionella, a bacteria that leads to Legionnaires’ disease. Legionnaires’ disease has a fatality rate of about 10%. .
Pipes are not the only place in a building where diseases can develop, either. Trapped water in a cooling tower or chiller often provides a breeding ground for legionella. The problem is compounded if cooling towers, typically located on a roof, are close to air intake vents for the HVAC system. Legionella particles are sucked into the air going into these intake vents. Now legionella is in the ventilated air in the building. In a bulletin earlier this year, the CDC recommends that in the case of a suspected Legionnaires’ outbreak, disease investigators identify and focus on cooling towers in the affected area.
BMS Helps with legionella control
Earlier this year the FICO blog reported on a legionella control project installed at the VA Hospital at Fort Harrison, near Helena, Montana. Using smart faucets, FICO engineered a system where the water was regularly purged from the hot water lines in rooms that were not used regularly.
FICO also used sensors to monitor samples of water through the system, ensuring that pH levels, biocide readings, and temperatures were at levels where legionella growth would be difficult.
“The Schneider Electric BMS system installed by FICO is ideal for monitoring these sensors,” said Dan Morris, a project manager for FICO. “Everything is fed back into the system. We monitor for all the measurements—temperature, biocide readings, pH levels, and more—ensuring they fall within certain parameters.”
Measures like this can also be incorporated into the support systems for water towers, and linked into the BMS system so that conditions are always monitored. Biocides, the chemicals that inhibit the growth of legionella, are most effective if the water has a narrow pH range. The BMS can connect to sensors that constantly monitor the water’s pH level to ensure they are at the correct level.
This is accomplished through chemical metering. The BMS determines if the water requires certain chemicals to attain an optimum balance. Those chemicals are then metered into the water. Chemical metering can also be used to ensure that the water does not become corrosive to the point that it can damage pipes, a situation that is often overlooked in commercial buildings.
FICO Leads the Industry in Integrating Water Management into BMS
The VA project mentioned earlier in this blog post represented the first protocol of its kind for linking smart faucets to a building management system, and it was designed in part by FICO. FICO is one of the leaders in the industry for designing and installing building management systems, providing turnkey building management systems (BMS) for businesses, schools, office buildings, hospitals, and others in and around Montana for more than twenty years. We are also experts in building management and system integration services, and our staff has numerous industry certifications. FICO works with leading BMS component manufacturers to provide optimum environments that are comfortable for employees and save energy.
