How Much Are Leaks in Your Building Costing You?

If you look at your water bill, and register with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) online, most buildings that have the new meter configurations that are readable from the street can watch their water usage on an almost hourly basis. When you look at your hourly consumption, you will see it listed in cubic feet per minute (roughly 7.5 gallons to the cubic foot) and when you look at your daily readings, you will see a low point (typically, at 3 A.M. when there is little water use); this amount is usually caused by leaks.

If that amount is 1 cubic foot per minute, for instance, the leaks in your building are costing $50,851 per year.

Leaks are hard to find. For some buildings, it has been found cost-effective to attach meters to each major plumbing line, and hook these to a data collection box, and then to a computer and/or the Internet. What do we find? One line is 60 percent of the building leaks, and once fixed, another line is 40 percent of the leaks.

A very dedicated manager in The Bronx I worked with last year brought its building usage from 280 gallons per apartment to 220 gallons to 185 gallons in two years. I asked how she did it, and she said, "I had the super knock on doors to find the leaks; we changed to all front-loading washers in the laundry room; and then we started swapping out toilets."

Adapted from "Water Remedies" by F.L. Andrew Padian (Habitat, April 2015).  

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