Why and how we do it
Can you imagine having to organise a blind survey at every large commercial property you have? Think of the time and cost involved!
Especially when only 1 in 50 properties has Shadow Water. 49 of the 50 surveys would be a waste of your time and money.
That’s why we have developed our unique ‘Calculate, Link, Rate’ approach.
‘Calculate, Link, Rate’ uncovers Shadow Water opportunities at the desk.
It gives you a small number of manageable, targeted site investigations. You get fast, dependable results - at a low cost.
Here’s how it works...
We have built a software platform called ShortPlus that calculates commercial water use. It contains tens of thousands of properties.
Each one has a calculated water use figure made up of hundreds of components and their estimated demand. It is surprisingly accurate.
Our calculations are 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 need some non-household address and consumption information from you.
We tidy up this data – handling things like clocking events and misreads. We then link your data to ours – most of which is done automatically.
Once our calculation is linked with the actual metered use, the magic can happen...
Thousands of non-household properties are given a water efficiency rating on the scale below:
We’ve adopted the standard colours as used by EPC certificates and energy efficiency ratings, so they should be familiar to you.
But we've added two special categories: Super Low and Super High. These are off the scale at both ends of the spectrum.
This is where your big benefits lie:
Most of your properties get a clean bill of health and fall into categories B to F.
Keep an eye on these however, as over time, their ratings will change. But don’t waste time and money investigating them now.
Our ‘Calculate, Link, Rate’ approach produces a manageable number of outliers. Normally just 50 properties for 1 ML/d of benefit – less than one a week.
We review each outlier at the desk. For example, it may be that low consumption at a hotel could be due to a refurbishment. High use at a golf course could be due to a Summer irrigation spike.
Someone then needs to visit the sites to investigate the cause of the issues. We can do these site investigations or you can use your own teams.
Whoever investigates goes to site with a reason and purpose to understand the ‘gap’ in consumption.
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 our detailed water use calculations and personalised these to individual properties. It works.
Working with you and how this might fit in
Our unique service uncovers complex cases of Shadow Water. You’re probably already finding the non-complex cases (eg Void properties, Simple Leaks).
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 Shadow Leakage and the same again for Shadow Demand.