How Water Audits Can Help Reduce Your Business Utility Bills

Businesses looking to improve their water footprint and start operating more sustainably, while reducing their utility bills at the same time, could find it particularly beneficial to have a water audit of their site carried out.

These audits involve comparing water usage, including volumes, against what you’ve been charged for by your water company, with the aim being to reveal any discrepancies and inconsistencies that may have manifested over time, leading to you being billed incorrectly.

Visibility is the name of the game where water consumption is concerned and if you don’t know how you’re using water and where, you can never really be sure that you’re not being overcharged.

As an example of what can happen if you don’t take charge of your bills and know exactly what you’re being charged for and why, take a look at this BBC News report about the Livermead Cliff Hotel in Torbay which is currently in a dispute with Pennon Water Services over estimated bills to the tune of an impressive £15,000.

It seems that the hotel believes it has been overcharged by thousands of pounds, with bills dating back to between 2012 and 2014, because its water meter wasn’t connected. Although the hotel claims that the meter was known to be faulty, it wasn’t replaced by the water supplier.

Hotel director Anthony Rew explained to the news source that over the course of three-and-a-half years, the business was overcharged 7.5 cubic metres of water per day, when typical usage was 5.5 cubic metres.

He said that the faulty meter was first discovered in 2014, adding: “We went out to the meter, went to read it, couldn’t read it. [We] put our hand inside where the meter was and pulled the meter out. It wasn’t even attached.”

The dispute with Pennon Water Services has now been going on for six years, with the hotel threatened with disconnection for failing to settle the account.

In a statement, the water company said: “We will always work with our customers to investigate the cause of any consumption concerns. We have different allowances depending on different scenarios to help bring in line a customer’s bill with their own average usage.”

How can water audits help businesses?

To avoid distressing and time-consuming situations such as the one Livermead Cliff Hotel has been facing for the last few years, it’s essential that you deepen your understanding of your business water use so that you can identify the most appropriate ways to save water, reduce consumption and drive your bills down as a result.

This is where water audits really come into their own and you may well find that you can achieve up to a 30 per cent reduction in charges for water supply and wastewater disposal as a result.

It’s also entirely possible that you may be able to put in a claim for refunds for historical overcharges – and we’ve seen some of our clients succeed in getting refunds of £500,000… and even more!

The audit itself starts with an in-depth analysis of your historical water bills, reviewing a complete record of water supply and wastewater bills going back at least 12 months. If your business incorporates multiple sites and different premises, we’ll need to see bills for each site and from every supplier you have.

Of course, this can be a very arduous task but bear in mind that we’re trying to gain full visibility of your water expenditure so you can enjoy full control over a significant business overhead in the future, so a bit of hard work at the beginning will pay serious dividends later down the line.

As well as asking for copies of your bills, we will also likely need other information as well, depending on the nature of your business. For example, we may need to know the number of public toilets on site, staff numbers, details of leisure facilities like spas, plunge pools and swimming pools, catering facilities and so on.

Once we have all the information we need, we can then carry out a preliminary desktop water audit so you can see exactly where you can save money on bills.

Water-saving measures include the likes of rainwater harvesting, grey water reuse, water leak detection and repair, and water monitoring where remote monitoring equipment is installed to track water flow hourly for ten years. This is particularly effective for identifying leaks, as it will reveal spikes in usage as they happen, suggesting that there may be a leak on site and giving you the opportunity to deal with them quickly.

If you’d like to find out more about this kind of service and the business benefits that come with it, get in touch with the SwitchWaterSupplier.com team today.