Auditel Consultant:
Adrian Burton

Are your Profits Trickling Away

21 May 2010 | Filed under: Uncategorized

Having completed a number of water audits over the past few months it highlights how little attention businesses attach to this particuler cost. There is a lot of information about water conservation available through the water companies websites but businesses would appear on the whole to still not be checking their bills. If they took the time to study them they might just find profits are trickling away.

A water bill in general is not difficult to understand it will consist of :

Charges for water used based on cubic metres

Charges for waste water based on cubic metres and directly related to how much water used

Standing charges

Surface Drainage (removal of rainwater)

The water companies quote on most of their sites what the average consumption for an individual in an office should be at 6 cu metres a year. So armed with this information it should not be difficult when receiving a bill to calculate what an estimated daily usage should be and therefore determine if water usage is high. For people of a certain age like me C u metres does not mean much, but if you convert to imperial then it is 220 gallons. Now you start to consider how much this actually is.

If we take an office with 30 staff then they would be expected to use on average 180 cu metres a year or .49 cu metres a day. If you were that average office and you found you were using up to 1 cu metre a day then probably not something to be alarmed about. However, if your bill was showing above 1 cu metre a day then it is possible that money is going down the drain literally.

So Auditel would encourage all business owners to do a quick sanity check of the water usage looking at the daily usage. If it appears high then check for leaking taps, toilet cisterns not shutting off, possible leaks on a boiler etc.

Remember high water usage if caused by a leak is hitting you twice as you are being charged for the waste water as well .