Public Housing Environmental & Conservation Clearinghouse

Water Conservation

Water conservation refers to reducing use of fresh water, through technological or social methods.

Water conservation is the most cost-effective and environmentally sound way to reduce our demand for water. This stretches our supplies farther, protects freshwater availability and saves money – both through reduced water bills and reduced sewage bills. These efforts promote sustainability, energy savings and conservation of our freshwater habitats.

Water Benchmarking Tool

Benchmarking water consumption is a very useful starting point for PHAs to target water saving opportunities. It can help PHAs with their overall asset management strategy. Water Benchmarking allows PHAs to assess each project’s water consumption and easily target buildings and developments to reduce water related utility costs.

Benchmark your properties’ water use (MS-Excel, 724KB) against your other buildings and against other similar PHA properties in your region. Your building will score from 0 – 100, where 0 means water consumption is probably excessive and 100 means that the building probably uses water very efficiently. Important: this is a whole-building tool. When inputting your water use make sure resident-paid water use is included.

A benchmark is a standard by which something can be measured. Water Benchmarking is the comparison of one building’s water utilization to the use of water in a similar building. HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) has developed the preliminary benchmarking tool to establish if a building’s water utilization is higher or lower than normal usage for similar buildings. The benchmarking tool is self-explanatory but the user’s guide provides direction if needed.

In order to develop the water consumption benchmarking tool, water consumption data was collected through voluntary release of information from thousands of buildings in nearly 350 PHAs nationwide. Regression analyses were performed on these datasets to see which of over 30 characteristics were most closely linked to water conservation. The benchmarking models were then developed by quantifying the effects of the building traits that most commonly correlated with water utilization.

Although regression model-based benchmarking is not a perfect science, it serves as a good initial indication of whether a particular building or project currently uses more or less water than would normally be expected for that size and type of building in that climate.

The Water Benchmarking Tool is still under development. PIH is interested in your input. Try the working copy of the Water Benchmarking Tool to see how well it operates. To help improve this tool please report your experiences to pheccinfo@deval.us and share your results and thoughts on reporting data, development and accuracy.

You may access the Water Benchmarking Tool at the following link: Water Benchmarking Tool (MS-Excel, 724KB).