Week 7-9 Update
Good afternoon all,
This week’s meeting was short but was necessary to update Morgan on the progress made over the past three weeks and to determine the next steps to be taken. To catch everyone up I have attached all of my findings for information on the chilled water loops. A quick summary of what I discovered is that the vet med chiller plant is on a separate loop because of how far it is from other campus buildings. In its loop it has 5 different buildings it provides chilled water to. The other 6 chiller plants are all connected in the main chilled water loop. The loop consists of about 115 different campus buildings and they can be seen in the document. The buildings found in this loop were found by sorting the utilities billing information by chilled water vendor. The five chiller plants on the main loop also have the capability to isolate themselves from the main loop and provide certain buildings with chilled water. This list can also be found in the document.
I then read through the BIF’s plumbing materials list to see if it had any information on low flow fixtures. I found out that for some of the listed items like the lavatories in the description says “max flow 0.5 GPM in compliance with energy policy act of 1992 and ASME/ANSI standard A112.18.1M.” We do not know if it has all the listed fixtures and will have to continue looking into other building plumbing lists.
Besides researching I also created a rough water audit plan for campus buildings. This will be a very intensive process as most water audits need to test every water fixture to get the actual flow rates of them. The first part of the audit will be reviewing data on each building to see the history of water consumption. Next the billing and metered water will be compared to see if there is a loss of water. After the data collection and comparison is complete auditors will walk through the building to see if there are any visible leaks and test each water fixtures actual flow rate. The flow rate will be recorded and used to compare each building against each other to see which will but retro fitted first based on most water consumption.
For this upcoming week I will be researching and creating more questions to ask about the chiller plants and low flow water fixtures. We will try to plan meetings or phone calls with other knowledgeable people to see if they have information that can help our progress and clarify any questions we have. I will also be creating a checklist that can be given to interns or workers on how to perform the walk through part of the water audit and finding vendors that can sell us the tools needed to determine flow rates of different water fixture.
Thank You,
Austin Jung
