Christoph Lohr: Welcome to The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical. When talking about the built environment, we would do well to remember: we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us. Therefore, on each episode, we’ll discuss the latest trends from IAPMO in plumbing and mechanical safety, sustainability and resiliency. Join me, your host, Christoph Lohr, and together we’ll explore the ways we can make our buildings shape us for the better.
And welcome back to The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical. I’m your host, Christoph Lohr. And joining me this week is Andrew Morris, senior manager of policy and programs with the Alliance for Water Efficiency. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
Andrew Morris: Thanks so much, Christoph. Glad to be here.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Well, the Alliance for Water Efficiency, known as AWE for short, could you tell our listeners a little bit about AWE?
Andrew Morris: Yeah, I think AWE is an excellent place to work. I’m still relatively new here, and we’re a membership-based nonprofit dedicated to water efficiency in North America. And the thing I like about AWE most is we spend all of our time every day thinking about water efficiency, demand-side management, and all the things around that.
So that’s our day to day, every day. We have over 500 members across North America. These range from utilities, water utilities, businesses, government bodies, researchers, academia. So we bring together a lot of different organizational members to that discussion and we work together to collaborate, to build knowledge, and to advocate for more water-efficient urban water use, municipal water use.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Excellent. And what was your career path to getting to work for AWE?
Andrew Morris: I think like everyone in water, mine’s a bit of a windy road, but the common thread is I’ve always worked with utilities. I started out doing legal and policy and regulatory work for electric utilities, some oil and gas, natural gas and water.
And that was in the private sector. And now in the past maybe 10 years or so, I’ve switched to working with exclusively with water utilities. I did that with the state of Georgia. I did that with some local governments in metro Atlanta. And now at AWE and the nonprofit side, I get to work with partners at the national level and all across North America, which is a great place to be.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Excellent. What are some of the key questions we need to be asking ourselves about residential water use and water efficiency?
Andrew Morris: Working with utilities and on supply and demand side, I think one thing that happens is we look at our last plan, or we look at the most recent data we have, which could be pretty dated.
And believe it or not, the water-efficiency space moves somewhat quickly. And so I think we should really ask two questions, um, pretty regularly, and that is, where has water efficiency been and our water use been, where is it today and where are we going? So making sure we understand what’s happening with our water use.
And then secondarily, what does that mean for how we work as a utility, as a business, as a plumbing company, as a premise plumbing engineer, whatever the case may be, but it’s what’s happening with our water use and then what do we do about it?
Christoph Lohr: So from a plumbing standpoint then in the residential side, those two questions, it sounds like there’s an area focus on residential indoor in single-family and multifamily?
Andrew Morris: Yeah, that’s a major focus of ours and of water efficiency. We do a broad range of things, but being with you here today, I’d love to talk more about the plumbing and the indoor side. And that’s an area where we do have pretty good data.
Christoph Lohr: OK.
Andrew Morris: And then also there’s a lot of change that’s happened over the past 25 years or so.
Christoph Lohr: What are some of those changes and trends, historical trends and data in terms of water efficiency for homes?
Andrew Morris: When I was, when I was working back in Georgia, I recommended that every one of my staff members, the first thing they read if they were new to the industry, was the Water Research Foundation’s Residential End Uses of Water.
Christoph Lohr: OK.
Andrew Morris: And there’s a Version One from 1999 and a Version Two from 2016. And that looks at residential water use from a really large sample set from across North America. So it’s a great way to orient yourself to indoor water use on the residential side. And it also shows between those two studies — one was ’99, one was 2016 — we’ve seen roughly about a 1% annual decrease in water use over that period, so fair amount of movement, not in any given year, but when you look at a 15-year period or so, you see some change that is pretty noteworthy.
Christoph Lohr: What do the trends look like these days?
Andrew Morris: So it’s still, we don’t have perfect real-time information.
I think the best source we have are some smart technology companies. One of them is Flume. They make a smart meter that measures water use in homes, and they actually produce a quarterly water use index based on, I think they might be up to 100,000 devices or so, that looks at water use across all over the United States and some Canada as well, and they’ve shown that water use has continued to decline actually about at that same 1% pace. Metro areas vary a little bit based on how much new construction they have or state-level efficiency, but generally speaking, if you look at the most recent quarter from Flume data labs, it shows that water use is still on that march downward at plus or minus a 1% annual decline.
Christoph Lohr: Gotcha. Gotcha. Are these trends likely to continue in the future?
Andrew Morris: I think so. There’s several sources, particularly on the indoor side. One is we’ve seen more and more states adopting requirements for particularly WaterSense or other efficient products. We’re up to almost 20 states now in the United States, covering more than half the U.S. population.
And many of those are recent years, so the efficiency gains from those laws haven’t really been fully realized. And then also on the appliance side, the Department of Energy continues to make changes on water-using appliances and energy-using appliances. Most recently, residential clothes washers has seen some changes. So those take a while to play out.
Christoph Lohr: I’m assuming EPA’s WaterSense and Energy Star programs are the ones too that you’ve kind of been tracking?
Andrew Morris: Yeah, so they’re kind of the leading edge. They’re not required, but as voluntary programs they encourage both consumers to buy and manufacturers to make products that are more efficient than what you typically see in the market, so in addition to those mandatory things, you have some market experimentation and a lot of people making really efficient products.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Excellent. How can we as an industry and society do a better job of planning for and accommodating these changes?
Andrew Morris: I think there’s a couple areas when it comes to this indoor water use; one’s really just on the building side. I think your most recent guests — or one of your recent guests — was talking a lot about the Water Demand Calculator® and things that IAPMO has that helps you think about what do all these changes mean for premise plumbing design, for service line sizing and for meters?
And I think that’s a really important element of, we want to make sure when we’re building our buildings or rehabbing our buildings that we are thinking about the current state of affairs and not a code that’s based on a code that’s based on a curve that’s from 1945. So I think making sure we’re using the best-in-class tools for designing premise plumbing. And so that’s really, on the customer side I think there’s some work we can do there in the building industry engineering work there.
Christoph Lohr: What about on the interface between customers and utilities? Are there any adaptions we should consider in that area?
Andrew Morris: Yeah, this is an interesting space. Say you’re an engineer, premise plumbing engineer, and you’ve designed your system and you go to your utility and you tell them you think you need a meter of a certain size and your main supply line of a certain size.
Sometimes utilities use a different sizing methodology when they think about how to size meters and service lines. In fact, the American Water Works Association has a manual, I think it’s M22, and it’s all about water meter sizing and service line sizing. And that does encourage flexibility and kind of being attentive to what’s happening in your community, but much of it’s still based on fixture count and Hunter’s Curve-type sizing.
So it’s possible you might do all this good work as someone designing the building, and you go to your utility and then you have a disagreement about how to size the meter, because their calculations come out with something different. So there’s work to improve that by including the Water Demand Calculator.
Also, the Water Research Foundation recently did a project on that very topic. It’s project No. 4689, and it’s assessing water demand patterns to improve sizing of water meters and service lines. So I think there’s good things there, we just need to keep having that conversation to make sure we’re communicating well together.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. That assessing water demand patterns to improve sizing of water meters and service lines, were there any notable things for the utility side to be aware of from that particular report?
Andrew Morris: I think from a revenue side, and this would apply both with putting in new meters for a new customer or if you’re doing a meter changeout, or if there's a major change in a building, depending on your meter type, you can actually have problems registering all the use if you oversize the meter at really low flows. There’s actually a utility revenue incentive to make sure that you are sizing your meters properly so that they register all the use in the building. And it depends on the meter, so it doesn’t apply universally, but I think the utilities have an incentive to do that too, to make sure they’re sizing their meters right. At least on the revenue side.
Christoph Lohr: Fascinating. Again, talking about the utility side of the meter, what about other changes on the utility side of the meter aree things that you’re tracking?
Andrew Morris: We did this research with you guys actually, with IAPMO, AWE did, on a review of connection fees and service charges by meter size.
And so some of the push-pull there is if meter sizes are getting smaller and you tie all your impact fees, your connection fees, your meter installation fees based on meter size, you know, it’s kind of a push-pull because on one hand, you want right-size meters to register use over time. But on the other side, if you go down a meter size, you might get less revenue from your connection fees and impact fees.
I think you totally should think carefully about those fees, make sure their sized correctly, and some are decoupling them really from the meter size. That way there isn’t that potential disconnect there.
Christoph Lohr: What would you recommend as future policy considerations for further reduced water use in homes?
Andrew Morris: One of my favorite programs is the WaterSense homes program, and it covers indoor, but it also covers outdoor, which is an area where we haven’t seen as much change in terms of efficiency. It also is a performance-based program, so it allows the builder to decide how to be efficient. Depending on what market you’re in, what type of home you’re building, what price point you have a lot of choices about how to be more efficient instead of just one way.
Again, it covers outdoor in a really fulsome way, which I think is an area where we haven’t seen as much improvement as we have on indoor. So AWE is working on some programs at the federal, state and local levels to help our members and others find ways to incentivize the WaterSense homes program, which is a voluntary program.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Well, to wrap things up, one last question for you, Andrew. I have learned so much from our interactions and from our conversation here today. Would absolutely love to have you come back on the podcast. Maybe if you want to bring a colleague or two from AWE, I think you guys are wonderful resources for the industry.
Andrew Morris: That’d be great.
Christoph Lohr: What would you talk about the next time you're on the podcast?
Andrew Morris: That is a tough one. I think one thing that we don’t do, this is again on the utility side of the meter, is really what all these changes mean for how we think about our distribution systems, our utility water distribution systems, and our utility collection systems on the wastewater side.
I think there’s really just more discussion that can be had between the plumbing industry and the building industry and utilities so we understand the trends and how we can work together to make sure we’re adapting in ways that meet multiple goals.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Well, Andrew, it’s always a pleasure and a privilege to get a chance to chat with you. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to share your expertise and insights with myself and our audience. On behalf of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical, I just want to say thanks again and really appreciate you.
Andrew Morris: Thanks so much. Pleasure is mine. Appreciate it, Christoph.
Christoph Lohr: Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical. Love this episode of the podcast? Head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate and leave a review. Please follow us on Twitter @AuthorityPM; on Instagram @theauthoritypodcast; or email us at iapmo@iapmo.org. Join us next time for another episode of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical.
In the meantime, let’s work together to make our buildings more resilient and shape us for the better.
