Dan Sterling of Water Hero talks about automatic water shut off valves, and how to deploy commercial sized shutoff valves of 2 inches or larger for your small business, commercial enterprise, or organization, including configuration and shut off triggers.
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Dan Sterling, founder and CEO of Water Hero, and today we’re going to talk about automatic water shut off and how to really deploy this best for your small business, commercial enterprise, for your organization. We’re seeing a great surge of leak detection utilization at the commercial scale. Now that we have things like two inch automatic shutoff valves available, more and more businesses are deploying this.
Let’s walk through exactly how to configure and set your system for maximum protection. The first layer of triggers is based on the continuous time of flow. For example, in your business you may have an occupied mode and an unoccupied mode. It could be, while the building’s occupied, that if water runs for 20 minutes continuously, you’ll get a text alert. If it runs for 40 minutes, you can set it so that you get a text alert and the water will automatically shut off. Now these are all completely user configurable by your team and you need to study your water usage for a couple of days to get a baseline to find out what settings are proper. Same thing for temperature settings too, you can view those as a freeze alert. So you can also get text alerts if the temperature is ever below 37 degrees at the meter. You’ll get an alert if it’s over 80 degrees or 85, whatever settings make sense. You can also apply those.
A new layer that we’ve developed, another trigger that we’re really excited about, instead of continuous time-based, it’s based on volume of water. We call this flow over time. Think of it…we can configure in, and this is all user configurable, study your water use; You may determine that in your multifamily property with a hundred units, typically you’d never see water flow over 1,000 gallons in an hour. For the flow over time, the volume approach, you could dial in another layer of triggers that would be, let’s say 5% more. If 1,050 gallons runs over a one hour period, send us a text alert. What buildings are doing in that case, they know there’s something abnormal going on and they can send someone on staff around to see what it is. It could be a public toilet facility, toilets running nonstop, someone left the water on in a facility like that. Any number of reasons, but it’s great to have this volume based trigger as well. That just gives you another tool to really help save money at your property and also protect yourself from burst pipe damage.
