Plumbing Retrofits and Audits
April 5, 2010
I'm Dan Hounsell, editor of Maintenance Solutions magazine. Today's topic is plumbing retrofits.
To perform a successful retrofit, maintenance and engineering managers first must know everything about the system in question. So before developing plans and buying products for a large plumbing retrofit, Mark Duclos, director of maintenance and operations with the University of Georgia, needed an inventory of installed plumbing fixtures to better anticipate the challenge his department would face.
In 2002, Duclos hired a consultant to look at all the fixtures on campus and come up with suggestions for retrofits that would transform most of the university's fixtures from standard flow to low flow.
"In addition to getting the exact number of these fixtures, we also knew model numbers, makes and what types they were," Duclos says.
The inventory covered 134 buildings comprising about 8 million square feet. It determined the university — aside from residence halls — had 1,439 toilets, 337 urinals, and 2,525 faucets.
Duclos used results from the inventory and in 2005 started buying low-flow fixtures to replace the standard-flow units. The university hired two plumbers whose only job was to perform the retrofit projects.
- specifying one-half-gallon-per-flush (gpf) urinals to replace most of the 1.3-gpf units
- specifying manual faucets for most facilities, primarily due to cost considerations in comparison to automatic-style faucets, Duclos says
- installing one-half-gallon-per-minute (gpm) aerators to replace the 2-gpm units
- removing automatic-flushing devices in many fixtures after students perceived those units to be inefficient.
The fixture retrofits, along with a renewed focus by the maintenance department to repair leaking fixtures and piping, generated 30 million gallons of annual water savings for the university, Duclos says. The university also addressed water use in its cooling towers and research buildings, producing 90 million gallons of annual savings in those areas.
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