reed connects water systems featuring valves, meters and sensors to owners and operators of commercial properties. For a project in Toronto, reed provided a connected solution with sub-metering and benchmarking to find operational efficiencies and water bill reductions of $25,500 per month.

The design was done in-house by Adam Bartman, who is reed’s co-founder and a master plumber. The design was also approved by a licensed engineer. 

"The project was an upgrade of an existing tenant plumbing. After an initial site survey where we tracked the existing piping system and determined it was inadequate with rusted piping, multiple tenants feeding from the same branch,” Bartman said. “We essentially extended the incoming water line into a main header running above the main corridor to allow easy access and t-off a pipe with water meter into every tenant space. We recommended to add an electric shutoff valve at the main incoming line.”

Mark Dulberg, project manager at PowerJet Plumbing was the contractor. 

"We had to work during off hours to not disrupt the tenant’s operation. First, we removed all the old piping and installed new piping system where every tenant had a t-off from a main header. We installed 10 Neptune meters for each tenant and had reed connect them to the cloud. After two months, we were called back to the site to change a leaky toilet,” Dulberg explained.

Challenges

The owner of an industrial plaza at 119,121,123 Manville Ave. has 10 tenants with no visibility into each tenant’s monthly water usage. The property was not sub-metered and water bill was split equally between the tenants. The main tenant, a metal plating shop, complained to the landlord that it was being overcharged for water use and held back utility payment for several months.

Solution

reed recommended the reconfiguration of the plumbing distribution to individual units and installed water sub-meters to all 10 units. reed system tracks water usage and provides a real-time consumption and benchmarking report to the landlord, who now uses the software to generate monthly reports for the collection of water utility payments according to each tenant’s usage.

Results: Water conservation by awareness

The main tenant was notified by the reed system of a continuous water usage on weekends, when the unit was generally unoccupied. A technical evaluation found that shop equipment was discharging water directly to the drain. Once the failure in equipment was rectified, the tenant’s monthly water bill decreased by half from $50,000 to $25,000.

Results: Reduced administrative work

The landlord no longer has to go onsite to take water meter readings and track water usage data. Instead, the process now involves simply logging onto the reed dashboard, creating monthly reports, and sending them to tenants.

Results: Improved visibility on water usage

With visibility into water usage for tenants, the reed system identified abnormal water usage from one of the smaller tenants at the property: a running toilet was running at a rate that would have burned $500 per month in wasted water costs. After closer investigation initiated by the landlord, a plumber found and repaired a leaky toilet.

Results: Elimination of water-related disputes

Tenant disputes concerning debatable water consumption volumes were replaced with hard data, eliminating payment delays and the cash flow impact to the landlord