LeakBird

(May, 2009, Janet Portman, American Apartment Owners Assocation)
Q: I’ve lived in a 40-unit apartment building for the last five years. Until now, I have paid for water, as required by my lease, based on a submetered water system.
Recently, the landlord said the meters are broken and she has decided not to fix them, claiming [...]

In order to calculate how much your toilet wastes in a city like San Francisco, we need to know the water footprint of your entire building. Of course, if you’re a property manager or landlord, you’ll be especially interested in this, as tenants don’t foot the water bills anyhow.  I’m going to give facts from [...]

If you recently received a high water bill, there’s a better than 90% chance that it was due to a running or leaking toilet.
Of course, in order to know that your water bill is a bit above the norm, you ought to know your typical, average monthly or bi-monthly water bill.  In a recent post, [...]

There’s a fantastic article called 15 Easy Toilet Tune Ups that runs through a few of the sounds your toilet makes when it’s on the fritz, that is, running or leaking or in need of repair.
Basically, even though I know there are more sounds a toilet can make, I’ve put together a list of seven:

The [...]

Because no matter what I seem to do, my toilet always seems to find a way to run for a few minutes, I often think about all of the ways in which a toilet can run or leak. When you get down to it, there are two main ways the water can outflow.

Down the overflow [...]

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman

It can be said that we don’t value what we don’t pay for. To tenants who don’t foot their units’ water bills, a running toilet may only mean a minor audible nuisance.  To a landlord or property manager, a running toilet means a higher water bill and [...]

The manager relies on systems, the leader relies on people.
Unknown
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Murphy’s Law

When it comes to running toilets, you can’t rely on your tenants to report them, unless you have a system in place. In other words, people depend on systems. Chapters 5 and 6 will explore systems in further [...]

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
George Berkeley
Before we move on, let’s rephrase Berkeley’s famous question:
If a toilet runs in the bathroom and no is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The latter part of this chapter will address [...]

I don’t think you can get away with putting your talents in a toilet bowl and not having them flushed away.
Sean Penn
If something can go wrong, it will.
Murphy’s Law
Whether it’s talent, water or cash flows, if they’re in the toilet bowl chances are one hundred percent they’ll get flushed away. And when it comes to [...]

Toilets run.
Dana Haasz
Conservation Administrator, SFPUC
If you are a property manager, a landlord, or a water manager, or if you would like to be, this e-book is written for you.
We at LeakBird have done hundreds of hours of research over the past two years and would like to share with you what we have learned.
This e-book [...]

Property managers, landlords and water companies or utilities consider two resources their most precious:

Money
Water

Without secure cash flows and water supplies, their businesses will be under water almost instantaneously.
Because 95% of landlords and property managers pay their tenants’ water bills, it’s natural that they’re interested in where they can most effectively manage and secure the [...]

The Boston Globe recently ran an op-ed about water conservation in rental properties entitled, “Do Environmentalists Rent Property?“, which also has some fantastic comments from landlords and tenants in the greater Boston area.  The author wonders if she’s the only one who is a good tenant when it comes to not using more water than [...]

(March 16, 2009, The Water Blog, Portland Water Bureau)

March 16-20th is the EPA’s first, annual Fix A Leak Week.  Fix A Leak Week is sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense program, which seeks to protect the nation’s water supply by promoting efficient products and services and educating the public about water conservation.
According to WaterSense:

11,000 [...]

If a toilet runs in the bathroom, will anybody hear? You can bet your bottom dollar they’ll hear, but only when the property manager or landlord receives the high water bill, that is, AFTER THE FACT. And believe us, it’s loud and clear!
I remember my talk with Dana Haasz, Conservation Administrator for the San Francisco [...]

The average household US water bill varies widely from state to state and municipality to municipality.  Small town household water rates fall somewhere between $1.00 and $2.00 per 748 gallons of water or HCF (hundred cubic feet).  Large city household water rates are from $2.00 to $3.00 per 748 gallons of water.  (Nationally, water rates [...]

Okay, so this number may shock you, but trust me, I didn’t make it up.  I actually did a year’s worth of research, and I haven’t heard anyone say this yet — in fact, I’d like someone to disprove it.
Here’s what I extrapolated.  I’ll preface by stating that 25% to 40% of all in-building, residential [...]

Acoustic water leak detection has been around a long time. It predominates in the water industry when it comes to listening for leaks in underground pipes, in order to protect and secure municipal water supplies from catastrophic underground leaks.  A couple of companies that come to mind are SubSurface Leak Detection, Inc, Davis-Inotek Instruments and [...]

I’ve written about how to calculate your San Francisco water bill, but I thought it might be useful to know how the SFPUC functions and just how many landlords and property managers are getting excessively high water bills due to the likes of tenants’ running toilet conditions everyday.
Back in June of 2008, I spoke with [...]

 
I recently came across an insightful 2006 document (pdf) from New York’s Department of the Environment on water/ sewer billing, water metering and water efficiency, put together for New York landlords and property managers.
I know that it’s now three years old, so some of the information is perhaps dated, though in essence I would hazard [...]

Do your tenants’ toilets keep constantly running? Do you receive high water bills maybe once or twice a year? What approaches do you take to combat this problem? What is your system for dealing with it, as a landlord or property manager?
We randomly called 10 property managers in San Francisco to enquire into this issue. [...]

(Jan. 10, 2009, News 8 Austin)
Nothing beats a free ride, or seat, for that matter. That’s because the City of Austin is giving away vouchers for new high efficiency toilets to replace your old wasteful ones.
With a record drought here in Central Texas, water conservation is on everyone’s mind. But how can you make [...]

Via the Portland Water Bureau.

(Dec. 22, 2008, Blue Planet / Green Living)
Toilets account for almost 30 percent of residential indoor water use in the United States. They’re also a major source of wasted water due to leaks and inefficiency. Unless a replacement has been installed, in a home built prior to 1993, each toilet likely uses 3 1/2 gallons [...]

(Dec. 17, 2008, WBBH-TV)
A homeowner took his water woes to the Collier County Commission after receiving an $1,100 water bill for the month of August. But commissioners washed John Martinowich’s hopes down the drain…
According to his August water bill, 124,000 gallons of water was used – more than 20 times higher than his household’s normal [...]

(Photo Courtesy of Treehugger.com via AP/David Zalubowski)
Tenants who fail to report leaking or running toilets to Landlords or property managers cause water billing nightmares.  Usually, the best a Landlord can do is figure out in which unit the leaking toilet condition occurred, schedule a plumber to fix the problem, foot the exorbitant water bill, then [...]

(Nov. 11, 2008, The Appalachian)
The new facility is predicted to fulfill Boone’s water needs for the next 20 to 30 years…
“The facility should increase our water intake to seven million gallons a day,” Miller said.
“A leaky toilet can waste more than 500 gallons of water a month,” Gimlin said. “We are one of the only [...]

(Oct. 8, 2008, MarketWatch)
Research indicates that more than 85 percent of water leakage in residential plumbing systems is found in the toilet and a majority of toilet leaks are caused by faulty or worn flappers. A silent leak in a [...]

(Sept. 25, Tuscon Citizen)  “The Water Conservation Alliance of Southern Arizona recently gave 61,000 leak detection kits to area water providers, though none were given to Tucson Water.“

The only problem is, few people are motivated to do the dye test every month.  Why not subsidize something that is more effective, like an acoustic battery-operated leak [...]

What with the new higher water rates for San Francisco set for Tuesday, July 1, 2008, I thought it’d be useful to describe how your water bill is calculated by the SFPUC, and demonstrate how easily your water bill could double or triple due to a running toilet or two.
An SFPUC water bill is made [...]

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American Rivers

http://blog.americanrivers.org/wordpress/index.php

[...]

Last year property management and real estate behemoth CitiApartments purchased my 17-unit-or-so Victorian apartment building, which is kitty-corner to the upper east end of Dolores Park in the Mission in San Francisco. Lately my toilet, which must be from the 80’s (built some 30 years ago, in a time when natural resources seemed infinite), [...]

I’m a property manager for a mom-and-pop company that owns several residential buildings in San Francisco. In April of 2007 one of our buildings, a twenty-one unit, early 20th century Victorian in the Lower Haight, saw its water usage more than double over a two-month span, going from approximately 70,000 gallons to 168,000 gallons of [...]