How and why we do it
It would be nigh on impossible to do a blind survey at every large commercial property you have and hope to find the issues we find. This would take you a lot of time, a lot of organising and a lot of expensive manpower.
That is why we have developed our desktop approach.
If only 1 in a 50 properties has errant metered consumption, then why visit every one?
Our desktop investigation is sector based. Each sector has its nuances.
For example how do you compare the impact on water use between a posh hotel’s rainfall showers with luxurious mini-shampoos and a motel with trickly showers and plastic curtains.
We have built a software platform called ShortPlus that assesses commercial water use. It contains tens of thousands of properties. Each one has a assessed water use figure made up of hundreds of components and their estimated demand. It is surprisingly accurate.
We compare our assessed water use with your metered use to find outliers. We call this a Consumption Audit.
To get the metered use, we don’t require any large data extracts. This removes a lot of delays, costs and data security risks from the service. We simply log into a leakage system and collect the metered consumption from there.
Most of your properties will pass the Consumption Audit. These get a clean bill of health.
But some properties fail the Consumption Audit. And this can happen two ways:
The Consumption Audit process produces a manageable number of outliers. Normally just 50 properties for 1 ML/d of benefit – less than one a week.
Our well-mannered, yet determined technicians visit these. They go to site with a reason and purpose to understand the ‘gap’ in consumption.
Commercial Properties with Large Leaks outliers: we attempt to pinpoint the cause of the high metered consumption. Most of the time it’s an underground supply pipe leak. Sometimes it may be inefficient plant or lots of leaking toilets.
Revenue Leakage outliers: we attempt to prove the cause of the low metered consumption. This may be an unmetered feed or a bypassed meter or a faulty meter.
We work with you and the customer to get the issues resolved. It’s all well and good finding the issues, but until they are resolved, you don’t get any benefits.
This approach might be boringly, painstakingly efficient. But it delivers cost effective results.
Large users – why is it so hard to detect issues?
No two large commercial properties are the same. A complex mixture of facilities and demand equals highly variable usage patterns.
Take swimming pools.
Those with water slides tend to draw more users than a pool without slides. Users spend longer in the pool. The showers and toilets are used more frequently. The swimming pool filters will need backwashing more often. A pool with slides cannot not be simply benchmarked against a pool without slides.
Complex sites, variable use, assets not on billing systems, under recording meters, the complexities of combination meters, background leakage and wastage, sporadic and seasonal use. Added together this makes a simple desktop benchmarking exercise virtually impossible.
There might also be a general assumption that what is being billed is correct. We call this the ‘fog of billing’ where the billed consumption hides any anomalies affecting the accuracy of the billed data.
This is why we have developed detailed consumption assessments and personalised these to individual properties. It works.
Working with you and how this might fit in
Our unique service is stand-alone. We find distinct issues that will be getting missed elsewhere.
However, we are not arrogant, we do not claim to be a panacea for all ills.
Regulatory and business pressures will drive the need to lower leakage through traditional means such as find and fix and pressure management. There will still be missing and void property projects to run. Stopped meters will be flagged and changed.
But what we find is extra help toward achieving those ever stretched targets and goals. It will be over and above anything else being delivered from your existing initiatives. That is the beauty of our service. It is complementary.
And there is recurrence.
Repairing one large customer side leak will not stop another happening. An unbilled meter will not be a one off event. This service can deliver results year on year.
What we identify can be quantified. Results can be measured. Extra revenue and leakage reduction can be included in future business plans with some certainty they will be achieved.
How much could you find?
This really varies depending on the water company.
We do not over promise and pride ourselves in delivering the outputs we sign up to.
Experience means that we can accurately gauge what we can offer you based on the number and type of commercial properties you supply.
If you’ve read all the way to the bottom of the page, you must be somewhat interested.
So to satisfy your curiosity, as a rough figure, you could expect to find 0.7 to 1.2 ML/day per 50,000 commercial properties of Revenue Leakage and the same again for Commercial Properties with Large Leaks.