The Hot Water Mystery
At Clean Cut Energy we work very hard for our property management customers and help them solve problems that they often don’t even know they have. As part of our service offering we not only implement checks and diagnostics on systems to make sure they are functioning properly but also on scenarios where systems fail even in irregular ways. In this case our system noted and alarmed us about an unusual situation where water was running backwards in a suite.
The submetering system was a four pipe system where each unit had both a hot water supply and a cold water supply to each unit. Water was flowing in to the unit on the cold water line and exiting the unit (running the hot water meter backwards) on the hot water line. Although we had not contemplated this scenario when we implemented the alarms we were able to diagnose it quite quickly because of them.
This is actually a possible scenario in water systems where the pressure between the hot water line and the cold water line is not balanced. A raft of shower cartridges failed inside this building and resulted in the cold water flowing back down the hot water pipe because of the difference in pressure.
This could have resulted in the unit owner receiveing a very large bill and months of frustration between the submetering company the property manager and the unit owner but diligent investigation and inspection by our team helped us isolate and correct the problem. We then implemented an alarming function our customizable database system to alert both our team and the property manager to future occurrences of this issue.
Each property we service isn’t just a building it is a community of people that all work hard. Many Submetering companies believe that their responsibility is to bill only. Clean Cut Energy believes that our responsibility is not simply to send out utility bills but also to help provide a public good, the very principal that most utilities were founded on. Using our engineering knowledge to help detect and fix building problems is what we refer to as submetering.