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cr0ft

Plumbers Arms member
Plumber
Gas Engineer
Nov 10, 2008
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Lincoln, Lincolnshire
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Heating Engineer (Has GSR)
40 ish in patients, circa 100 staff in from 9-5. Skeleton nursing staff overnight just to keep things running.

6000L of cold and hot used from 11:00-16:30 yesterday. Another 6000L used from 16:30-03:00 this morning when the tanks ran dry!! I closed off bathrooms at 16:30 yesterday so is it really possible to use 6000L in that time??

Just one main kitchen and 2 smaller kitchens (think small domestic) on the wards.

This is on top of whatever is being brought in on the separate cold water mains feed from the main hospital!

Cold water tanks feed 2x steam heated 3000L calorifiers (for hot water) and cold water pipework to taps/toilets and showers. All pumped through a pump set from the tanks.

Taps are fed from separate water mains supply on top of this!

What could explain such a huge water usage??
 
40 ish in patients, circa 100 staff in from 9-5. Skeleton nursing staff overnight just to keep things running.

6000L of cold and hot used from 11:00-16:30 yesterday. Another 6000L used from 16:30-03:00 this morning when the tanks ran dry!! I closed off bathrooms at 16:30 yesterday so is it really possible to use 6000L in that time??

Just one main kitchen and 2 smaller kitchens (think small domestic) on the wards.

This is on top of whatever is being brought in on the separate cold water mains feed from the main hospital!



Cold water tanks feed 2x steam heated 3000L calorifiers (for hot water) and cold water pipework to taps/toilets and showers. All pumped through a pump set from the tanks.

Taps are fed from separate water mains supply on top of this!

What could explain such a huge water usage??

Depends.
If things are running 24/7 then yes I suppose so.
 
What could explain such a huge water usage??

Is there a laundry on site?

There are some water consumption benchmarks for NHS hospitals on page 14 of this report:

http://cibse.org/getmedia/a9ab0fc1-...Energy-Consumption-in-Hospitals-1999.pdf.aspx

According to this, depending on the type of hospital, a good (i.e. low) consumption for 40 patient beds in 1999 was expected to be between 8800 litre / day and 21000 litre / day. This would have been for somewhere that had things like urinal flush controls, etc. that are relatively standard today.

Anyway, bottom line is that at ca 18000 litre / day (if that's the total) for your hospital it may be okay, if it's offering an 'accute' service or on the high side if it is a 'long stay' establishment.

Being the NHS, there will be records of the 'normal' water consumption somewhere. Try to track down their building services manager.

I'm rather partial to Bourbon biccies myself.
 
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Running out of water between say midnight and 3:00 am is a bit of a worry. You would expect minimal water usage after 9:00 pm.

Does the place have a laundry?
Does the kitchen wash their dirty dishes and so on later in the day?

Commercial appliances use a substantially greater amount of water than the domestic appliances we are used to.
 
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