Valencia College
OP-22: Water Consumption

In order to reduce water consumption on all campuses, Valencia College converted to drought-tolerant landscape species, reduced indoor fixture use through retrofits with high efficiency fixtures, and while we were converting chillers to water-cooled, we implemented high cycle water treatment on our cooling towers.

By replacing St. Augustine grass with drought-tolerant Bahia grass, selecting other drought-tolerant plants and utilizing soil-moisture sensor based irrigation controllers on East Campus, we reduced outdoor water use. We also offset potable water demand by utilizing reclaimed wastewater on West Campus and well water on East Campus. We have one 9000 gallon cistern for toilet flushing in one of our LEED Gold buildings on West Campus and will have another 10,000 gallon cistern for the same purpose in a new building being completed on Osceola Campus this winter. We converted to high efficiency (and generally Water Sense labelled) fixtures (1.28 gpf toilets, 0.25 gpf urinals, and 0.5 gpm faucets) through retrofits as well as in our new buildings. We had learned that cooling towers present great savings opportunities, and by 2009, on West Campus with the chilled water loop expanded to include two new buildings and one that had previously used air-cooled chillers, our monthly potable water consumption was 2,163,000 gallons with water bills of $14,891.00. In May 2010 we contracted with a firm to set up a water efficient chemical treatment program. Between June 2010 and May 2011, we saved 9,369,000 gallons of billed water over the previous year, over 4 times the expected savings. Since makeup water for the cooling tower must be softened to avoid scale, by reducing water consumption, we were also able to reduce our salt consumption for the water softener. This added another $9,000 annually in savings, making the overall savings realized during that period $111,000.00. We are following the Florida Water Star certification procedure of the St. Johns River Water Management District for our new building being completed this winter on West Campus, in their pilot commercial Florida Water Star program. Actually few adjustments were needed in our current specificiations to comply with the Florida Water Star commercial certification criteria since we have focused on water efficiency for some time.