Public Housing Environmental & Conservation Clearinghouse

User's Guide to the Water Benchmarking Tool

The current water benchmarking tool is very easy to use; just fill out the gray spaces on the electronic form and it automatically ranks the building (or project) on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is the least efficient, 100 is the most efficient and 50 is average. Besides the building's yearly water usage information (in gallons), the tool requires only seven inputs, all of which are either very obvious or easily obtainable:

1. Zip code (to automatically input climate data)
2. Gross floor area (square feet)
3. Number of units in building (or total units in all buildings sharing that meter)
4. Is building single family detached or semi-detached (HUD Building Types 5 or 6)?
5. Is PHA billed directly for water consumption? Insert "N" if residents are billed directly for their water.
6. Number of units that either have laundry hook-ups in their residences or have access to a central laundry located in that building (or the group of buildings that share that water meter). For instance if a building has 50 units but no central laundry, and 25 units have their own laundry in their unit, insert 25. If two buildings sharing a water meter contain 50 units total and one building has a central laundry for them both, insert 50. If a building has 20 units and all 20 have their own laundry, insert 20.
7. Number of buildings that share that water meter

***Warning: This is a whole-building benchmarking tool so the total building water consumption must be entered, otherwise the score will be incorrect (the efficiency will be artificially high). If residents pay all or part of the water bill, you must include their usage, too, in the Annual Consumption inputs in order to get an accurate benchmarking score.

Click on the link below for several examples of benchmarking water consumption using voluntary PHA residential data. Once you have reviewed the sample data you may directly access the Water Benchmarking Tool to begin evaluating your buildings' water consumption.