Leading Financial Institution Saves 150,000 Liters of Water In One Building

This story is about a leading European financial institution with a long history. Since 2019 their main UK office has housed over 2,000 employees across 8 floors. The state-of-the-art building was designed to be energy efficient and sustainable. It recently achieved an overall score of 87% in accordance with BREEAM, the world’s leading design and assessment method for sustainable buildings.

Facilities Management (FM) services for the building are provided by one of the largest commercial real estate service providers in the world. On top of fire alarm and emergency light testing, the FM service provider is also responsible for maintaining all legionella compliance activities. Legionella is a water-borne bacterium that causes Legionnaires disease, a potentially lethal respiratory illness.

By installing 164 of the world’s smallest wireless sensors and automating their legionella compliance efforts through our Expert Partner Infogrid, they saw an annual reduction of

• 150,000 liters of water
• 379 hours of manual flush time
• 98% reduction in legionella-related carbon footprint

Manual Legionella Compliance Wastes Water and Time

Legionella grows if water remains stagnant, usually at a temperature between 18 and 48 degrees Celsius (64.4 and 118.4 Fahrenheit) for a prolonged period. The traditional way to prevent this problem is to employ someone to regularly flush all water pipes and manually check the water temperature. The FM service provider had a team visit the building 4-5 times a month for on-site flushing and once a month to conduct L8-related temperature checks.

During the COVID pandemic, when the office was nearly empty, the customer and their FM realized that significant resources were being used to both inspect and flush all pipes, even those where water had flowed. With 50 hot taps and 50 cold taps, each of which had to be run for 5 minutes, weekly flushing was taking around 9 hours.

Understanding that this was a waste of resources, water, energy, and money, they turned to Infogrid’s award-winning L8 solution.

Tiny Sensors & World-Class Analytics Lead to Huge Sustainability Gains

By installing 164 sensors across 5 floors of their UK office building, the customer and their FM service provider are saving 379 hours of flush time in a single year, the equivalent of 47 working days. 

In addition to ensuring Legionella compliance, the customer has been able to reduce its carbon footprint through L8 compliance activities by 98%.

By the end of 2021, they estimate that they will have saved over 150,000 liters of water, the equivalent of 600,000 cups of tea.

Based on these savings, the solution has paid for itself with an ROI achieved within 6 months of deployment.

The Infogrid Pipe Monitoring Solution Powered by Tiny Wireless Sensors: How Does It Work?

Mounted sensor with pipe range extender

The Infogrid Platform

Infogrid’s solution is based on data collected from wireless temperature sensors from Disruptive Technologies. The tiny sensors are cable-tied to pipes using customized pipe range extenders. The sensors measure the water’s temperature and wirelessly transmit the results to Infogrid’s cloud AI platform. 

The Infogrid solution allows the user to export reports on the status of the pipes that follow L8 regulatory requirements. The platform also comes with customized alerts in case of a problem and dashboards that visualize portfolio assets, status, and actions undertaken, all under one view.

The sensor solution intelligently identifies any pipes that contain stagnant water and need to be flushed. This process:

• Reduces the amount of human intervention needed for flushing
• Reduces water usage (as only the pipes that need to be flushed will be)
• Cuts energy consumption
• Saves money on energy and water bills
• Helps maintain Legionella compliance requirements.

Learn more about automating legionella compliance.

Looking at the Future

At a time when there is an intense focus on climate action, any source of reduced CO2 emissions, water consumption, and energy savings has to be embraced and scaled. On top of improving the planet, the solution ensures that health and safety obligations related to Legionella are maintained.

As a result of this success, the customer is expanding the solution to their remaining three floors in the building, as well as looking to install the solution in its other locations across Europe. The company is thus proving a track record of real estate and operational sustainability and corporate responsibility.

Infogrid is also looking to replicate this success story across the entirety of the FM service provider property portfolio, which could be a significant contribution to reducing the CO2 emissions from buildings.