| The United States uses about 4.8 billion gallons of water every day to flush waste. Since toilets and urinals account for nearly one-third of building water consumption, the potential for savings in this area is significant. Efficient water use can have major environmental, public health, and economic benefits by helping to improve water quality, maintain aquatic ecosystems, and protect drinking water resources.; The Energy Policy Act of 1992 established water conservation standards for the manufacture of four types of plumbing fixtures: water closets, kitchen and lavatory, faucets, showerheads, and urinals. However, most research has been focused on toilet water consumption in the residential environment. Therefore, the research examining the water savings in the commercial environment, which also includes urinals and lavatories, is long overdue.; This study has developed and tested an inexpensive system to monitor water usage in a commercial building. The study also investigated the water consumption of automatic flush valves and automatic lavatories to study potential water savings in those areas. In this study, overall water consumption followed the same patterns as GPF. It was highest for the tune-up phase with new 4.5 GPF diaphragms replacing the old 3.5 GPF diaphragms, and was 21,843 gallons. Next came the as is phase with 16,116 gallons, not including the lavatories. The automatic valve phase consumption was 11,504 gallons. The best performance was once more the low consumption phase with 8,715 gallons. This phase caused water consumption to be 40% less that the automatic valve phase when lavatories were not included and 32% less when they were. It appears that the most desirable configuration to minimize water consumption in this study was manual, low consumption valves in water closets and urinals along with the automatic lavatory valve sets. |
