Do you know how your building's boiler system operates?
Pop quiz: What costs more per year?
A) BMW
A) BMW
B) golf club membership
C) running toilet?
If you guessed C, you're right. In fact, a single running toilet can cost something like $8,000 per year.
If you guessed C, you're right. In fact, a single running toilet can cost something like $8,000 per year.
How much does a running toilet cost?
A building could be spending close to $50,000 to $100,000 in water, literally just going down the drain.
So why don't buildings find the toilets and fix them?
So why don't buildings find the toilets and fix them?
Unfortunately, that takes a lot of time.
And because tenants aren't paying for the water, they have no incentive to report them.
These toilets run endlessly for decades at a time, wasting a ton of money and carbon output.
And because tenants aren't paying for the water, they have no incentive to report them.
These toilets run endlessly for decades at a time, wasting a ton of money and carbon output.
How do you find the running toilets in a building?
People have tried to solve this using water meters.
A single pipe might feed a whole line of toilets. If you can put a meter on that pipe, you can say, “Hey, there's probably a running toilet on this line.”
The challenge is that, installing a single meter is really expensive, and you need one for each riser, meaning you could be spending $100,000 to install meters.
This is why virtually no building has them.
So, is the world doomed to have millions of running toilets that never get fixed?
The excellent news is…no. Smart controls can actually help us solve this problem.
Using smart controls is the fastest and easiest way to find running toilets.
There are devices you can literally snap onto a riser with no plumbing involved. And they run on batteries, so there is no electricity involved. It means in 5 minutes, very inexpensively, you can find all the running toilets.
The net result is that we can save a ton of carbon output, make cities cleaner and greener, and save everybody money.
In fact, how much a running toilet costs might just equal that golf club membership.
Even better, utility companies will pay to have smart controls installed. You can check to see if your building is eligible with this form:
