Installation of Low Flow Shower heads and Aerators in Apartment Buildings

The City of San Diego gives away low flow showerheads to anyone who has a residential survey, but we no longer install them due to the litigious society we live in. During one installation 10 years ago or so someone accidentally broke the shower valve or something and the resident actually sued the city. So now we give them away only. Besides showerheads we give faucet aerators and water conservation handouts and materials. We do drop in dye tablets in the toilets during our surveys to check for toilet leaks.

Maureen Hall
Water Conservation Analyst
City of San Diego Water Conservation
United States
www.sandiego.gov/water/conservation

Elisa, One study, commissioned by the Southwest Florida Water Management District, may be of use in your assessment of "lessons learned". The report describes the outcome of a pilot they funded and other US programs. I hope this helps....

http://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/download/social_research/Showerhead_Replacement_Final_Report.pdf

George Zoto, Ph.D.
Project Manager
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
United States

Elisa,

We recently conducted a small study on showerhead replacement in rental Multi-family buildings here in Calgary. We intentionally did not provide any educational material to the tenants to measure the response of tenants to the new fixtures (eg. we wanted to see if a change in flow rate would result in tenants taking it upon themselves to remove the showerheads and replace them with something they decided to purchase)

88% of tenants receiving a new low flow showerhead did not replace the fixture after six months.

As for installation, I think you could get around any legal issues related to damage if the building managers completed the installs. I am not sure that giving the fixtures to tenants for installation would result in a very high participation rate.

Let me know what you find when your study is complete!

Aaron Boulton-Chaykowski
Water Management Analyst
City of Calgary, Water Resources
Canada

Hello Elisa,

Hopefully this isn't too late to be of use for you.

I've been involved in managing large scale showerhead and tap aerator replacement programs since 1999 in Sydney, Australia (over 470,000 properties completed to date). The main issues we have found here that differentiates high-rise occupants from single, seperate dwellings are that high rise occupants are more likely to be tennants (or renters)and they are much less likely to receive a water bill that is specific to their appartment. Admittedly one or both these issues may be specific to Sydney.

To tackle these issues we worked with the building managers to install some sub-metering within the building. This seperated the water consumption of groups of floors, common areas, landscaping and the airconditioning cooling towers. While not a perfect solution this establishes a reasonably sound basis to measure savings and the data is then availalbe to use for ongoing promotion. Another significant and ongoing benefit is that the additional metering assists to detect and isolate leaks, provided the building managers take the initiative to monitor and read the meters. In some of the older buildings we've completed, the leakage component was as high as 40% of consumption.

Another tactic we used to aleviate the problem of not having individual meters was to seek permission from each participant to access their electricity account details. The combination of semi-aggregated water consumption and individual energy data enabled us to provide a convincing savings figure for ongoing promotion in other buildings.

Best of luck,

Andre

Andre Boerema
Sydney Water Corporation
Australia

I am curious, what is the flow rate of the showerheads you will distribute?
We are hoping to pilot-test a retrofit of 50 homes to Florida Water Star criteria and will be installing multiple fixtures. We plan to contract out the servise to licensed contractors to avoid direct liability.

Deirdre Irwin
Florida Water Star Coordinator
St. Johns River Water Management District
Palatka Florida
[email protected]

Hi Deirdre,

The showerheads we're distributing are 1.25gpm (4.7Lpm). They're Earth Showerheads and are not actually available on the market yet. We're getting them through Union Gas who gets them directly from Earth.

We're also doing aerators that are 1.5gpm (5.7Lpm). We actually did our first installations today. Our target group is multi-residential buildings so in order to avoid liability issues we're having the building managers arrange to have the installations done, usually by the superintendent or whoever does routine maintenance in the building. I if you're doing single family homes that wouldn't really work though. We do have volunteers who are trained to do flow tests and toilet leak tests go into the building and test the flow before the installation to check if actually needs to be done and then after to track the savings. The toilet leak test is just for the information of building manager and to get rates of leaking to inform future conservation projects.

Good luck with your test-pilot!

Elisa Cooper
GIG 2009 Project Coordinator
Guelph Environmental Leadership
Canada

The very simple way to convert a toilet flusher to limit it to flush only when the button is held down is to drill /puncture the flush~float ie sink it. Huge savings ~ slight inconvenience. Make em work for the water!

Tony Nelson
Mr
onetonpump
Australia