Are Commercial Buildings Saving Water Yet?

The water management and sustainability issue of water has finally put the commercial buildings in a forceful decision to use water judicially.

By SA Gayatri

Bangalore, April 11, 2019

Recently, the Orion Mall management has been using the Internet of Things (IoT), to enabled water and waste water management solution offered by the Green Environment India, a startup related to the IIT Madras incubation ecosystem.

IoT is the interconnection via internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.

In India, the average water consumption by commercial buildings is estimated to be 4.1 percent of total water use. The standard water requirements are necessary to keep a check on the water usage like water demand estimation and water management.

The Orion Mall is the first commercial building in Bangalore to use this initiative and it is believed that it has managed to save 3crore 42lakh liters of water since January 2019. The main features of this solution are to support the monitoring team, predict faults from and provide troubleshooting insights.

The project consists of tanks and digesters which are fixed in the reservoirs of the commercial buildings. These digesters are controlled by application. The whole project took three months to install which started in 2017, and after several checks of accuracy of the water at laboratory; the final operation was started in March 2018.

Satyam, a Commercial Building employee, said “We are able to save and reuse 3.8 lakh litres from the sewage treatment plant for non-drinking purposes. We see that this project helped us saving 25 percent on water footprint and 30 percent savings on water used”.

Buildings that use 200,001 sq ft floor space consume 53.5 gallons per day and using such an initiative can help to reduce the water stress.

Manu Nair, GM Facility, Green Environment India, said “This IoT solution has been fixed in tanker water uploading systems, water and sewage treatment plants and cooling towers. This process is believed to use the plant’s water efficiently. We also developed an application which is known as Greenvironment to monitor the whole system “.

“We also want to implement the same technology in many malls in Bangalore, this could reduce water stress of the city” “he added.

“Such initiative should be used to reuse the water which is consumed by the commercial buildings because a lot of water is wasted if not and by this methods more water can be saved “says, Priya Biswas, Environmentalist, Bangalore