Water management is one of the many tasks that most facilities will need to tackle at some point, both for health and safety reasons as well as compliance reasons. However, creating and implementing a water management plan is not as simple as looking up a cookie cutter program online and adding some chemicals to your water.
Instead, you will need to carefully consider the unique makeup of your specific system and develop a strategy that addresses those needs, including the growth of Legionella. This need not be done alone; you can (and should) establish a relationship with a water management company that can help you navigate this process with their years of experience.
What A Water Management Plan Accomplishes
A water management plan can be as nuanced or as simple as your facility needs it to be. No matter how complex it becomes, what remains true is that such a plan is a vital part of your facility’s processes. Water management achieves a number of goals for you, from reducing unnecessary water consumption to keeping people safe from potentially deadly bacteria like Legionella that thrive in the water. Your local and state governments will also have their own rules and regulations about how clean your water should be, which means that water management is a requirement in this sense as well.
Step 1: Determine Your Goals
The first step in creating your Legionella water management plan is to determine the goals you would like to achieve. This includes not only eliminating Legionella from within your system but also reducing water waste, cutting expenditure related to your water system and even establishing a team that handles your water management in your building.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Current Situation And Water Management Plan
Once you have considered the broad strokes of how you would like to approach your water system, including the “needs” that must be accomplished, you can consider how your building currently functions. Do you face regular Legionella presence in your water?
Are you paying more than you want to for your water each month? Are you finding that you face issues with corrosion or scaling in your system? Depending on how your system currently functions, you can make a plan. Knowing more details about Legionella, such as how many colony-forming units are in your water, is an important first step.
Step 3: Identify And Address Losses And Usage
At the same time that you are evaluating your system, identify any losses. You can do this by establishing an inventory of all the processes that use water. From there, you should be able to calculate how much water needs to be used versus how much is actually being used. Doing this can help you to identify leaks or other problems and allows you to address them early on in the process. This will become especially important when you address Legionella in your water to ensure your treatment spans the full length of your system.
Step 4: Implement The Water Management Plan
You now have all of the information that you need to create your strategy and put it into practice. A professional can help you with this project. Assign the teams you have created to their individual duties, and install any measures that you have previously determined are necessary for success. For Legionella specifically, also consider how changing your water temperature could help.
Step 5: Evaluate Your Progress
One of the most important parts of implementing a Legionella water management plan is regularly evaluating and measuring your progress. Your strategy does no good if you do not continue to refine it based upon new data and inefficiencies. Look closely at the results of your regular Legionella sampling, as well as changes to your utility and water bills (especially if you have a cooling tower), to learn more about how effective your plan has been.
Continue to refine and alter the water management plan until you have no further issues with Legionella or other unwanted aspects of your water, such as biofilms and unbalanced pH. If you do not know how to measure success with a Legionella water management plan, you can ask an expert who will review your system for you.
Trust The Experts To Help You Establish Legionella Water Management Plan
Whether you are just getting started on creating a Legionella water management plan or have already implemented your strategy and are not seeing the results you hoped for, you do not need to tackle this project alone. The experts at Tower Water would be happy to craft a water management plan that keeps you in compliance. Reach out to learn more or to get started.