Description: Increasingly, there is a requirement to safeguard water supplies in the UK and implement sustainable water use. Practitioners working to advise the office and hotel sectors on reductions in water consumption had identified a lack of suitable benchmarking information that would allow a simple method of comparing the water consumption of a particular property with national trends.

This report describes how suitable benchmarks have been found for water use in offices and hotels across England and Wales that will enable managers of offices and hotels to understand whether their property is performing well or poorly in comparison with other similar buildings in the UK, and to inform designers about target usage.

This detailed report should be read by those who want to understand how the research was carried out, or who wish to carry out similar benchmarking studies. This report also includes details of the lessons learned by the research team that may be of use to future researchers.

Keywords: environmental good practice, sustainable construction, water infrastructure, water resources, sustainable resource use, building technology, internal environment, facilities management

Contents: Executive summary 3 Acknowledgements 4,List of figures 7,List of tables 8,Glossary 9,1 Introduction and background 10,1.1 The project need 10,1.2 Who should read this report? 11,1.3 Guidance report 11,1.4 Definitions of benchmarking and Key Performance Indicators 11,2 Summary of key points 13,2.1 Summary of proposed benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators 13, 2.1.1 Summary of hotels sector 13,2.1.2 Summary of offices sector 14, 2.2 Further work/lessons learned 15, 2.2.1 Further work 15, 2.2.2 Lessons learned 16, 3 Methodology 18, 3.1 Developing the Key Performance Indicators 19, 3.2 Obtaining data 20, 3.3 Data manipulation and cleaning 21, 3.4 Benchmarks 21, 3.5 Analysis 21, 3.6 Lessons learned 22, 3.6.1 Obtaining and cleaning water company data 22, 3.6.2 Correlation between benchmarks 24, 4 Benchmarking hotels 25, 4.1 Water use in hotels 25, 4.1.1 Thames Water 25, 4.1.2 Welsh hotels water demand management 26, 4.1.3 International Hotels Environment Initiative (IHEI) 26, 4.2 Defining a Key Performance Indicator 26, 4.3 Other water consumption variables 28, 4.4 Obtaining data 29, 4.4.1 Separating data into water company areas. 29, 4.5 Hotel data analysis 30, 4.5.1 Initial correlation and aggregated analysis 31, 4.5.2 Dividing hotels into types for further analysis 32, 4.6 Hotel water consumption by star rating 34, 4.7 Hotel water consumption by star rating and presence of, swimming pool 35, 4.8 Hotels with swimming pools by category 38, 4.9 Recommended hotel benchmarks 42, 5 Benchmarking offices 46, 5.1 Water use in offices 46, 5.1.1 Thames Water 46, 5.1.2 Government estate 47, 5.1.3 Watermark 47, 5.2 Defining a Key Performance Indicator 47, 5.3 Other water consumption variables 48, 5.4 Obtaining data 49, 5.5 Office data analysis (floor area) 50, 5.6 Office data analysis (occupancy) 51, 5.6.1 The method of calculating personnel numbers. 53, 5.6.2 The type of building used in the research. 54, 5.7 Recommended office benchmarks 55, 7 References 56