Estimating commercial, industrial, and institutional water use on the basis of heated building area

Abstract

The commercial, industrial, and institutional (CII) sectors are significant contributors to public water demand. To estimate CII water use, utilities historically have relied on water use coefficients that use the number of employees as the measure of size. However, it is difficult to obtain this information at a resolution fine enough to differentiate among individual water users and adequately evaluate water conservation options. To overcome these challenges, a methodology was developed to estimate CII water use through spatial, physical, and economic property-based information publicly available from the Florida Department of Revenue (FDOR) for each of the 8.8 million parcels in the state.Water use data for 3,172 CII parcels were linked with FDOR data to develop average and peak water use coefficients normalized by heated building area. By estimating water use at the parcel level, the methodology provides baseline water use estimates essential to evaluating water conservation options. C ommercial, industrial, and institutional (CII) users account for a significant portion of the the total water withdrawn and delivered by public or private suppliers to end water users. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated water use from public supplies across the United States in 1995 as 17% commercial, 12% industrial, and 15% public use and losses (Solley et al, 1998). CII water use comparisons across agencies and water utilities are complicated by dissimilar approaches to classifying customers. For example, the USGS generally groups institutional establishments within commercial water use and defines public water use as water from the public water supply used for such purposes as firefighting, street washing, and municipal parks; water losses are usually dealt with separately from public use. According to a survey of water agency reporting practices for water losses (Beecher, 2002), regulatory agencies in nearly all states have set upper limits on water losses ranging from 7.5 to 25%, with 15% being the most common value. Thus, the USGS estimate of CII water use in 1995 can be expressed as at least 29% of the total water delivered. The USGS did not include commercial water use in its 2005 update of the 1995 national water use assessment (Kenny et al, 2009), but other researchers (Dziegielewski et al, 2000) have estimated that CII water use accounts for approximately 15-25% of municipal water use. On the basis of metered data, the commercial/industrial sector of public water supply systems in the Southwest Florida Water Management District

Predicting and managing residential potable irrigation using parcel‐level databases

“…This database structure can be used for end-use evaluations for any urban water sector. For example, Morales et al (2011) show how such data can be used to analyze end uses for the commercial, industrial, and institutional sectors. For a complete list of fields applicable to residential parcel level urban water analysis, refer to Friedman et al (2011).…”

Benchmarking Nonresidential Water Use Efficiency Using Parcel-Level Data

“…Simple benchmarks for water and wastewater utilities including water quality complaints, percent unaccounted for water, and adequacy of water pressure are presented by Ammons (2001), none of which are broken down by CII sector. A review of the available literature indicates that the vast majority of water use efficiency benchmarking for the CII sectors has been limited to simple normalizations of water use (Dziegielewski et al 2000;Brendle Group 2007;Morales et al 2011). These simple normalizations are ratios of a single output (i.e., water use) and a single input (e.g., building area, number of employees).…”

A framework for identifying performance targets for sustainable nanomaterials

“…In a previous report, the mean heated area of a sample of 221 warehouses in Florida was stated to be 30,114 ft 2 [22]. Assuming an average warehouse height of 25 ft, and a 2:1 building aspect ratio, the warehouse would be 122.7 ft by 245.4 ft, and have a total surface area (including the roof and 4 walls) of 48,519 ft 2 .…”