Collaborate on Water Bill Format for Planning with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Water bill format for Planning

all right you heard the magic words recordings in progress and it is 11 o'clock eastern here on the east coast good morning to all of you joining us for our dewey energy awareness webinars it is for those of you watching it later on the recorded version tuesday october 26 2021 which means we have just one more after this one but just a quick reminder this call is being recorded so if you don't want your voice picture all that recorded for posterity then uh keep it off otherwise well now you know please move on to the next slide and we are talking today about well we will get into this first um turn it over real quickly to eli levine manager of the better plans program oh well let me yes i'll introduce myself when we come back eli you all ready to talk about the better climate challenge sure i feel like the infomercial that you have to sit through before the program can start but uh thrilled to be with you here today it's been great to see all of the turnout across all of these different webinars uh happy continued energy awareness month to uh to everyone uh one thing we did want to raise awareness about so better plants for all this time has been asking folks to work with us towards ambitious energy uh water or waste reduction goals and we are venturing into the carbon space so we have a new better climate challenge where we are asking partners to set a portfolio-wide reduction uh in carbon of 50 over 10 years uh for those energy intense sectors that can be 25 in 10 years um you uh and you can uh go back and uh set an earlier baseline if that's uh if that's amenable for your existing uh corporate carbon goal so next slide but we are really excited about this uh not only does it help us move to towards the important uh topic of decarbonization that so many of our partners are already starting to think about but it's really a way to expand our partnership with so many of you and expand the ways for dwe to work with you and to uh expand our technical assistance so we want to work with you not only on showcasing what leadership is demonstrating uh successful pathways but uh the technical assistance that we offer as well as that peer-to-peer learning collaboration aspect that makes uh better buildings and better plans so special next slide so what do we ask we want you to commit to reducing your carbon emissions to continue to pursue energy efficiency uh participate in our working group so you can learn from each other and get the most out of the program and then you'll continue to share your uh your data with us and in return we will provide robust technical assistance and tools and training and uh resources as well as uh you know facilitating peer-to-peer learning and providing that uh national recognition so next slide so if you're interested in any of this and i really hope you will be um there's ample reasons for you to be interested not only is it good for your organization in the future but uh you know and all of these other resources all of these other uh resources below uh there's no cost to participate and we we hope that you'll do so so if you have any questions uh please reach out reach out to me the better plants team the broader due team uh thank you for considering this happy to answer any questions you might have about it uh later offline or uh whenever so i appreciate pete for you making the time for us just to raise awareness about this and i will turn it back over to you for the webinar at hand today thank you eli we are really excited actually about that expansion of the work under our better buildings and better plans programs for the better climate challenge so please if you have any interest at all as eli said reach out to him or if you're already part of our programs to your technical account manager it is as i said before energy awareness month and what i didn't say before is i am pete longhua program manager in the advanced manufacturing office here with department of energy i work on our education workforce development programs and as it is if you're tuning in to this webinar you are probably one of the 10 million people working in manufacturing in the united states or closely aligned with somebody who is and to that end we understand that it is the skills and the innovation of those people that are going to drive and our manufacturing industries in the next decade and beyond to be robust as well as conserve energy wild is energy awareness month i give you permission to be aware of your energy all the time and thankfully we have the experts from the better plants program to help us be more informed about how to do that we've had a number of webinars already you can check out the recordings those on the better building solution center we got one more to go so if you are watching us live that will be on thursday at 1 pm eastern you can check out yesevents.com energy awareness sign up for that that is yesevents.com energy awareness the one today is understanding your water bills i will say for the the last couple we've had about understanding those sorts of things your electricity and natural gas to me and i'm trained in this sort of stuff it seems needlessly complicated which is why i am glad that we have the experts here with the better plants program to help us understand it and and do better in terms of comprehending and using that information and the tools um to make your enterprise that much more efficient let's see we will go on to the next slide a reminder so we got a pretty full hour with you today but please any questions you got for those where with us live put them in the zoom chat if i see something that's going to be relevant right away uh to speak with our or to bring up to our presenter alex then i will do that if not then we will go ahead and talk about everything at the very end of our hour if you want to learn more about all of this there are information sheets and examples galore energy.com bbsc that stands for better building solution center energy.gov bbsc and with that i think it's about time to introduce our speaker pardon me while i switch over to another window to remind myself that alex potts is a research associate at oak ridge national labs and a technical account manager for the dua better plants program she completed her bs ms in industrial engineering from west virginia university go mountaineers and she worked at the wvu industrial assistance center during that time which is where we actually met for the first time she's continuing her research in energy intensive systems at oak ridge national labs and she's going to talk to you today about understanding your water bills over to you alex thank you pete that was a wonderful introduction i really appreciate that um so yeah i just would like to say welcome to the webinar talking about the uh understanding your utility bills water version uh but before we dive in i really want to give a topical overview of the program um so i know a lot of you live today or maybe you're watching the recording later may have some idea about the program but i just want to give you a brief little overview of what we do here at the program so this is the better buildings better plants program and our goal here is to really help those manufacturers and other industrial partners improve their resource efficiency so it's not just about energy anymore right so that was the initial start of all this is increasing your energy productivity and being more efficient with your energy but slowly we have expanded our portfolio here at the program so now we also include uh resources such as greater water savings so working better with that water efficiency we've moved on to include waste in that focus as well as more recently like you know i just mentioned we're starting to focus on that carbon emissions reduction so this is just a topical overview of what we're trying to help manufacturers industry do to improve their resources so some of the resources here for particularly better plants program partners um we do have four main categories of resources that i do want to talk about today just for a moment um the first one will be the low cost or i'm at no cost software and tools um so these are completely free tools and software to you so the most notable one would be the measure software where we have over 60 calculators available for our users as well as full-on assessment modules so you can analyze your particular system whether that be steam or eventually compress their pumping and fan systems we also offer our partners a no-cost tools equipment loan program so that program we will send you some equipment from our inventory if you ask and help you find real data that you can work with towards setting your goals for your energy water and waste reductions we also offer the finance navigator online so that is a database to look through the financing opportunities to finance these projects that you find and then finally the no cost resources and guides so those would be guides just like this understanding your water bills uh so we have a plethora and i will include the link at the end of the slides so you can go and see what other types of resources we have to offer the second resource category would be the training and education so that would be uh implant trainings mainly is the one we like to point out and we have conducted over 120 implant trainings to date we have since then gone virtual with our trainings and we've set up the trainings to be more of a course-like understanding where we meet for a couple hours once a week to do a deep dive on a system and this is really to help your employee education and to make them aware of those energy opportunities or those water savings opportunities we also have over 45 webinars completely available for you so this webinar you might actually be watching after the fact and this is one of the pre-recorded ones so other than that we have webinars from all types of systems from compressed air to fans to baselining your energy so that's always available to all of you the second resource that we like to or third resource we like to point out is that recognition aspect of the program so we do offer recognition nationally through the u.s um so that might be media online through leaked linkedin or twitter that could also be finding solutions on the solution center where we highlight some of our partners who are doing good case studies or good implementation models um and we do like to recognize all of our goal achievers that's the main you know really good recognition there if you've reached your goal we'd like to point that out the fourth and final category that we like to categorize our resources into would be the innovation in labs so as pete said earlier i am at oak ridge national lab and there are 17 national labs across the u.s and this really offers a plethora of technology and information to our partners to be able to help work with the national labs across the us uh we also offer other things like lab technology days where we will open up a particular lab and have our partners come see what's going on during that uh that time so for now those are on pause but eventually we like to hope to get back to that and invite our partners back to see what's going on in the labs and that last aspect we like to mention is the field validation program so this is a newer pilot for the partners where we help them with some m v on the new technology equipment that they implement at their facilities um so most of our our resources will fit into these four categories as always um if you are a partner and you're interested about any of these resources or any of these particular categories reach out to your tam they know all about them and we're here to help you right um so what does good leadership look like so these are over 250 partners that are part of the program at the point um it's still growing all the time and we have more partners being added and this gives a great opportunity for networking up from different sectors or talking to other people in your industry so these are really the leaders in that efficiency space so today that was all about the program so today what we're really going to deep dive into is understanding your utility bills so today i'll be speaking on particularly water bills and that's just one of the guidance documents right so this is part of a series so this is the third in the series of three for your utility bills we spoke about natural gas bills last week really giving you the insight of how that industry works and where your costs are going and prior to that we also talked about electricity bills so that's a deep dive on how your energy is uh really developed and made and where your costs are going and why do you pay certain fees and how to help you save money in your utilities so these are all three available online right now again i'll put the link at the end for your availability but it's a great thing to try and understand all of your utilities so a little bit about the the water guide in particular so water guys water bills can be a bit hard to decipher at times so sometimes you'll get a very long bill with lots of line items and you're not really sure why you're being charged a standby fee or fireline fee or whatever it may be and it can be very long other times it's very short and they don't necessarily give you all that detailed analysis maybe just a total of your bill so really this guy is to try and help you find out what all those little charges are and how they add up to that total cost some charges on your bill may appear monthly i might even be a yearly annual cost but still something you should be aware of and something that you should know that's on your bill um we do uh we will be covering how these different fees are used and why you're being charged them and where they initially come from and why they're being charged and the guides overall will cover the basics of their water and sewer bills um i do want to clarify that this document that we've put together in our webinar today is for utility bill water right so water that you would receive a utility bill for from a municipality or from a private water company this does not include that source water that a lot of manufacturers use so if you are self sourcing that is not covered under this scope of this document rather we're talking about a physical bill that you receive from your municipality or a private company so to start where is your water coming from how is it produced right um so water is a bit different than the other utilities we have looked at in this series so natural gas and electricity are produced and distributed then they're used and at the end that's basically the end of the utility line right the energy is transferred into the product it moves somewhere else um and that's the end of that utility right um for water it's more of a cyclical path it will keep repeating itself over and over so once that water is used and discharged it will rejoin the cycle and be treated and reused over and over again so you'll see here this is referred to as the urban water cycle so this is a bit different than what we learned about in elementary school the water cycle uh rather this is the urban water cycle so where's your water going in the system what are all the different stops so you'll see that we start at the top of the cycle we start with your source water um that source water can be rivers it could be lakes it could be ponds right wherever that water is initially being coming from so that water is pulled into a water treatment facility from that those local sources like ground waters or rivers water treatment facilities physically and chemically treat that water to balance it and make it to a potable level that you can then consume by removing those harmful substances and those pathogens that may occur in that natural source water that treated water is then distributed through a system of pipes and pumps where it is eventually reached by the end users whether that be commercial industrial or residential and those are who we consider the end user to be in this situation after that point the raw water that is used and dirty is collected via a sewer system and piped to what is known as a waste water treatment facility so you'll see we have a water treatment and a waste water treatment facility this is where the raw water is treated to a level that is seen fit by the epa and can be environmentally discharged back into those local sources so after it's treated and those pathogens and bacteria are removed to the epa standards it is then redischarged and the whole cycle will start again um so again this is the urban water cycle and this is the whole cycle that your your water will go through so your cycle may be a bit different so you might get water some of them may be sourced groundwater by yourself and you only get a certain percentage of municipal water maybe you collect your rain water maybe it's you have a lake nearby that you are able to use or that you own you might not have the same distribution system you may have industrial water sources instead of regular municipal water sources but overall this is the same cyclical path that water will pass pass through over and over again so we talked about the source water a little bit so let's talk a little bit about the treatment process so you'll see that there's four main methods there listed so we like to clump together coagulation and fluctuation and that method is more commonly seen in the water treatment rather than the wastewater treatment but it's still there so the way that one works is positively discharged chemicals are added to the incoming water and debris that neutralizes and negatively charges the particles in the dirt and it causes them to bind together and those are forming pumps that are called flock so you'll see in that that third image there the flocculation image that that dirt is being clumped together and it builds these these flocks right so due to that increased weight uh that flock will then settle to the bottom and that forms sedimentation right so it separates that flock and the water that layer of sedimentation then goes through a filtration system so once that flock is settled the remaining clear water is routed through a filtration system several filtration systems are used in the industry and they're they vary in composition and poor size so the bigger the poor the more that'll reach through the smaller the poor the more it'll catch right just the normal filtration that you think about common filtration systems include activated carbon uh maybe reverse osmosis membrane or a mixed media so maybe you have sand gravel and charcoal or i've actually seen personally a several combination right so i've seen membranes be used and then they'll go use the filtration or vice versa so you can have a variety of different filtration processes the real goal of that filtration process is to remove dissolved and suspended particles such as bacteria dust and chemicals from the water and you'll notice that it does go through quite a few filtration steps in some areas and other areas might not be so rigorous of a treatment depending on that local water the next step that we really like to mention would be that water treatment step so we call that disinfection at this point chemicals like chlorine or chloramine or even uv lights can be used to remove any of the remaining impurities this helps protect the treated water from germs during the distribution to the end user and it really keeps that water clean and tries to give you that potable water that you need or if it's a wastewater treatment it cleans it to that ep level of environmentally safe water for the environment the methods used in these steps will really vary depending on the local water and your geographical region in the country so you're not going to have the same water treatment all over the u.s right so water on the east coast will have different needs and waters on the west coast so there's different pathogens or different bacterias that have to be treated depending on that location the methods used will also have a direct impact on the cost of the bill so if you're in an area that has naturally more contaminants in your water you'll need a more rigorous treatment and in turn that will cost more on your water bills whether it's your sewer bill or your water bill it will cost more if you have to clean it more and that really makes sense and it kind of goes hand in hand so we've talked about some source water and some sewer water so let's let's talk about your real water bill right so here's the example water bill that you'll see in the document and there's some key things that we like to point out here on your water bowl that you should look for so the first would be the meter number so this meter number is actually physically located on your meter and it's going to ensure that your meter is the correct one on the bill sometimes your facility may have more than one meter and depending on your utility uh you may have multiple meters on one bill or you'll have a separate bill for each individual meter it's really up to the utility in that aspect the second value we like to point out would be that meter reading so that's the actual amount of water that your meter was read at that month you'll see that this one is considered an estimated usage and we like to point that out because sometimes you'll get an estimated reading rather than an actual reading and that's when they are able to kind of predict how much you're going to use and then the next month or two they'll come and confirm and adjust the bill ingly so in this case it's an estimated usage and not an actual reading the next one we'd like to point out would be that usage charge so that's your consumption or your usage charge on your bill so that's the incoming water to your facility and the charge that you're being paid for um so this bill was very nice and very straightforward and that it puts the rate right on the bill for you depending on your utility you may not have that rate directly on your bill rather you might just have that 304 dollars listed and not how they actually calculated it in which case you'll have to go back at your tariffs and see what those values would be that'd be the same thing for the sewer charge uh water is always separated into usage charge and sewer charge um you may have a different entity that you're paying so you may have municipal sewer but a private water so you can have a mix of bills so one bill may be sewer one may be water or like this one it will combine the two we also have a list of fees that usually are seen on your bill um in this case again this is a very nice bill that lays everything out that we made here sometimes these fees will just be clumped together and they'll say writers and give you the toll rather than separating it line by line here uh you'll see the ones listed here are your metering fee um sometimes utilities will have a metering fee and a customer fee sometimes you'll just have a metering fee and sometimes you'll just have a customer fee really what that's paying for is for someone to come out and read your meter and actually look at that stuff it also provides your general customer service this one also has your fire line fee which we'll talk about a little bit later and a storm drain fee so all these are additional costs that don't necessarily have anything to do with your volume of water and then the final line item is taxes fees and penalties so a lot of states will charge you state sales tax depending on where you're located uh and we will talk about uh state sales tax a little bit further on in the presentation about how you might be able to uh wiggle out of that or maybe find an alternative to avoid those taxes so i would like to show you some of these meters that we've talked about there's really three main meters that we see in the water industry right so we have an analog meter a digital meter and a dial meter so they're all three slightly different but they all really will read the same number some are just more modern some are cheaper some are bigger it all depends on what your utility uses and how they read their beaters so notice on the first one is the analog meter the way this one is read is the last digit actually does not move so that zero in the red box will always stay zero but instead how you read that last digit would be that sweeping arm so in this case it's in between six and seven the sweeping arm so it'll it'll read down to six so this meter would be reading three one six four two six um so it's a little bit harder to hold on to and understand sometimes but once you know that last digit does not move it becomes quite easy to understand the next would be that digital meter that has a solar cell to help power that digital lcd display and this is the easiest one to read right we all can read this one um it directly puts the number right out there for you to read quite simple and the last meter would be the dial meter and this is kind of similar to the analog meter but rather each dial is reading a different tens place so you'll see that the largest tens place in this one it would be a hundred thousand and in that case you would read each dial as a different tens place um you'll notice that all three meters are actually reading the 316 426 gallons is what this all three of them are reading right now and yet they all look very different you'll notice that all three beaters also have the units so all of these say the word gallons on them they also have low flow indicators meaning that if you're able to shut down and not have any flow at your facility uh and this would continue to move that actually a sign of a leak so something else is still consuming water um it's really there to indicate that flow is happening right and that's just one way to look for leaks at your facility you'll also have your meter number that i mentioned from your bill located on this meter and then finally the meter size is also commonly seen here so you'll see on this one we have 5 8 of an inch for that meter size something else we do like to point out is that depending on your meter size it could also increase or decrease your cost so if you have more flow and require that higher diameter of your piping then that cost goes up right so meters are the main way we actually get those consumption charges so water consumption or usage is the total amount of water that your facility uses to make products or has there for that comfort water so that is your incoming water that you're being charged for so that is clean water from the water treatment facility through the distribution pipes usually in the u.s it is measured in gallons or cubic feet a lot of times you'll also see in hundreds of cubic feet so that will come out as ccf so it's another common unit to see here in the u.s uh the final thing we'd like to point out as well is that sometimes uh without a sewer meter this value will also be used as your sewer volume so even though this is technically the incoming water that is being read uh if you don't have sewer meter or evaporation credits or things subsequent to that then you don't actually have a volume so they assume that this will be the same volume so let's talk about sewer charges a little bit so you'll see that this is the uh other portion of that urban water cycle so after it leaves the commercial industrial or residential users uh it is collected through those sewer uh pipes and that district or that system to gather that sewer and then goes to the waste water treatment facility so your sewer charges are actually used to fund the waste water treatment and that's why they separate it so wastewater treatment is for your sewer charges and like i said earlier without a sewer meter the sewer volume assumed to be equal uh the incoming volume so in simple words water n equals water out and a lot of utilities mines so depending on your industry this may be pretty close your losses may be negligible and it not be worth putting in a sewer meter in which case water and water out works for you um but in other industries so say beverage or food or chemical right you consume a lot of the water into your product your product is made of water so water-based products are leaving your facility in which case it might be worth looking into finding out about a sewer meter to help you avoid some of those sewer charges if you're not actually using the sewer so that's the idea is if the water is not going into the sewer you shouldn't have to pay for that wastewater treatment for the water that's not there so just something to keep in mind depending on your industry and your sector so like i said if the process consumes a lot of water you can either a sewer meter the second option would be to apply for an evaporation credit so evaporation credit doesn't always technically mean the water is evaporated it just means that it's not going into the sewer so some examples of that would be cooling towers uh so maybe you're losing water from your cooling towers and your your bleed off rates and such so we do have an example i will talk about that momentarily but that's a great way if you can't get in a sewer meter you might be able to find a way to get credit for evaporation credits depending on your utility this could be just a little bit of extra data right just a little bit of something extra or it can be a lot of data and they need uh daily numbers or hourly numbers even um so if you're interested in those evaporation credits i highly suggest reaching out for your utility and finding out what they require because every utility is going to be a little bit different in their requirements the final thing to know about sewer charges is some facilities can treat their own water so i do know several of my partners actually have to treat their own water and then they discharge it into the local sources to do that they have to treat the water to meet the epa standards and this way they're avoiding that sewer treatment charges or possibly surcharges which again we'll talk about later so i do want to go over a quick example for the evaporation credits for a cooling tower in this case so to give you a little heads up or a little uh intro right a manufacturing plant uses chilled water for both process and comfort water the chiller is water cooled and utilizes a cooling tower for heat removal the plant will add makeup water to replace the evaporated water from the tower and simultaneously it discharges the bleed off so to maintain the appropriate concentration of those dissolved solids so to help figure out if they can get evaporation credits the plant monitors both the makeup water rate and the bleed off rate so the difference between those two would be that evaporation volume so because they have those two values and their utility is willing to work with them using those two values they are actually able to apply for the credits so how much do you think they would get for that credit the first thing we have to do is calculate that evaporated water volume so we find that by again finding the difference between the make up water and the bleed off water and the difference would be the water that was evaporated so in this case you would have that 12 000 gallons a day uh minus that 4500 gallons a day to give you a grand total of 7 500 gallons a day that is being evaporated from the facility so from then simple calculation um it's going to be that evaporation credit savings is going to equal your evaporation rate times that sewer rate because that's avoided sewer cost in this case and that's the way that this particular utility set out their uh evaporation credit program uh so we just take that 7 500 and we multiply by an average of 30 days a month so you know below 28 or 31 so we'll take the average of 30 and then that third cents uh per gallon and that will give you a grand total of 8 100 a year of avoided sewer costs so this is a really a great example that my colleague came up with and it's something that's very useful in manufacturing to know about again so you want to know more i encourage you to reach out to your facility so we're going to talk about industrial water and industrial sewer so earlier on in the urban water cycle i showed you that it was a municipality in that case that was treating the water delivering the water and then taking the raw water and treating it again but in the industrial world we do have something called industrial water so this industrial water is one not as rigorously treated as regular municipal water the idea with this water is you might have uh a process that doesn't need uh as clean as water um so for a more non-sensitive product so maybe it's using as quench water right you don't need super clean water for that and because it's less rigorously treated it's going to cost less than that municipal water so you can actually save money by using an industrial water source and depending on where you're located your utility may have that source for you or you may have to find a third party for that the second part of it is industrial sewer right so this means that your water is industrial industrially dirty right so it's more dirty than your regular municipal treatment center can take care of um so this means it's a longer and more involved treatment process at that treatment center so this is used when water's too contaminated right so they can't take out all the chemicals and all the added pathogens or pieces of your your product right so they have to outsource that or they have a separate facility for that because it is more rigorously treated it will cost more than the municipal sewer that's just something to keep in mind and we will bring that back up in a few slides so writers and fees several other charges can be listed on your bill and uh in a lot of cases they'll have nothing to do with your volume of water or volume of sewer uh they're just additional fees that you have to pay to help upkeep the distribution system or to help you know pay for all those additional pieces um these are also called writers or modifications to your rate structure so it may be an additional line item on your utility bill these items are usually extremely descriptive and are used for a very specific purpose so for example a storm drain fee that fee is actually calculated based on the amount of porous ground that you have around your facility so the more you build the less porous ground you have to retake the water right so the water cannot go back into the ground because you're building something on it um so to help offset that the extra water has to go to the storm drains so that storm drain fee is actually used to help upkeep the storm drain lines a fire line fee would be a feed that you have to pay if you are being [Music] if you have separate water lines for a fire uh so for a lot of facilities this is just in case water right so you shouldn't ever have a volume listed on your fire lines fees unless your fire line goes off right so that might be an indication of a leak or your fireline fees may have been used in case of an emergency so that fee is there to say that at all times you will be provided this amount of water and it's ready for you to use at a drop of hat which is a good thing the third one which i thought was a bit more interesting was the standby fees so there's actually two different vernaculars for standby fees so first a standby fee can refer to a fee that's imposed on undeveloped property so you say you own a lot of property right in the anticipation that it will one day require potable water sewer or drainage so it's kind of just saying oh you're getting ready to build maybe we should uh go ahead and gather that charge so that we are ready for you when you're ready for the water the the first type of standby fee that i just mentioned this is typically collected with your property taxes but you'll see it is a standby water fee it's typically not on your bills but it can be on your property taxes the second type of standby fee uh it's similar to electrical demand response programs right so demand response being that uh too much demand on the grid and they have to have everybody off the grid so that they can divert power elsewhere so you may see a standby fee in drought-prone areas or in rural areas where the majority of the local water is consumed by industry so if you're in a small town has lots of big manufacturing you may see this feed it happens in times where water demand is higher than the supply the utility company can call what we call an event where industrial consumers are instructed to reduce or stop their water consumption for a period of time that way it can be rerouted to residential areas hospitals or emergency services if you do have this fee if you don't respond to a standby event this is a penalty that's on your bill for not reducing your water enough to help support those emergency services um so that is a general standby fee the last one i really wanted to point out in the document was the sewer treatment surcharge so i spoke earlier over industrial sewer where your water might be a little dirty other than municipal can handle so a sewer treatment surcharge means you have dirty water but the municipality can't handle it with some extra chemicals and some extra treatment so this may be you have too much of a particular metal in your water and you'll be charged extra on that based on the amount of that that metal in the water so it's just an extra charge to help pay for the the extra treatment that you're requiring of your municipality so let's talk about non-water charges so these are some things that aren't anything to do with water at all right so the ones we just mentioned uh your storm drain fee your fire line fee your standby fee all those still have to do with water right so some other charges you may see are not related to your consumption at all not at all these are normally fixed charges and they're built into your rate structure but making sure you're on your right right schedule can actually save you some money and that's something we'll speak about a little bit later as well um some charges can be avoided with just a little bit of planning and we do like to point that out that you should check your bill every now and then and make sure that those charges and those fees can't be avoided so some examples would be customer fees or metering fees late payment fees are insufficient fund fees so those are examples of ones that can be avoided right so late payment fees is when you pay past that date sometimes papers get shuffled and it just you miss a payment right or you uh you're wait by just a couple days so i can't tell you how many facilities i've seen that if they just scoot their payment method and how they do it just a few days it would save them thousands of dollars a year so that is something to keep in mind every now and then check your physical bill and see what's on there the third one down there that list would be local taxes and state sales tax and i did mention that earlier but i want to say that some states will allow that sales tax exemption for manufacturers so if you can prove that a certain percentage of your water is going directly to manufacturing depending on your state you can actually get that tax removed from your bill um so depending on your state so here in tennessee we're over nine percent that would be a nine percent discount on your bill um so it really it's free money if you just apply and can prove that you need it um in some cases that will mean you need a predominant use study and that again is something you need to contact your utility about every state is a little bit different but reach out you never know the next uh ideology here that we really want to talk about is the true cost of water so if you're unfamiliar with through cost of water this includes all of the cost per unit of water and you'll see in this graphic here that on your bills you'll see on the left a charge for your municipal water so it's the water you receive on the incoming side or also the sewer water would be on your bills but are you thinking about everything in between right so what happens after you get the water in your facility well you might have to pump it you might have to treat it more for your own process maybe you heat it maybe you cool it um you know maybe you do the wastewater treatment at the end as well as regular sewer water um so true cost of water is really the idea of the summation of the entire cost for that gallon that you brought into your facility um so and sometimes this can be double or triple the cost of your your water uh that's on your bill um they use this value a lot of manufacturers do to better evaluate possible projects in your cost savings uh so you're not just saving your utility bill you're also saving energy right so save energy because you're not pumping you're not heating you're not cooling um so the gives you a better macro understanding of that cost of water um i do want to point out that the better plants program has developed uh the plant water profile tool and i have linked it here on the slides but again if you just google pwpx you'll actually find it probably one of the first ones to pop up um this is an excel add-in that way it's very easy to use and very easy to download and it will ask you all this information about your water and where where it goes what happens with it do you have chillers or you're using steam it'll help you actually calculate that true cost of water while also helping you balance your water so water balance your facility is also a very important part of this tool so now let's move on to rate structures so we talked about your sewer talk about your water and there is a charge but what are those charges right so there's several common pricing options that you see in water so one would be a uniform rate where no matter your consumption high low you're going to have the exact same unit cost the whole time the next would be block rates so the first would be a decreasing block rate so with decreasing block rates the unit cost of water decreases as more water is used after that consumption tier is full usage moves to the next block and it's a little bit cheaper rates the more you use the more those tiers fill up and then the cheaper it will be per unit as you keep going this rate is most often found in rural areas for agriculture use and heavy industry in regions where water is plentiful there's lots of water and they want to encourage that manufacturing and that agriculture the second is the increasing block rate this rate system encourages conservation by increasing the cost as more water is consumed increasing block rates are commonly found in more urban areas where the water supply is not quite plentiful and it's you really use to help uh be more restricted on your water usage so encourage that conservation of water uh the next step is time of use pricing and there's two main ones that we'd like to talk about the first would be the drought rates so the two most common uses are drought rates and seasonal rates um the drought rate is found in regions where droughts are experienced intermittently so it's common for droughts to occur so they build it into their tariffs when rainfall is limited the water in the cycle is lessened and it requires those regions to conserve water during drought seasons rates are adjusted upward to discourage usage and the important part of this one is the higher the level of drought the higher the unit cost and this structure is really meant to conserve water during those specific drought times so again the drought level will determine the cost so it is a varying structure the second time of use pricing is seasonal rates seasonal rates are similar to drought rates and that water costs more in particular seasons rates are usually increased in the summer in this one when less participation occurs and a decrease in off seasons that have more or that regular precipitation the rate is a little bit different in drought rates and the fact that it's either on or off yes or no rather than a varying level um and it really it has not necessarily anything to do with the drought levels but rather is there enough precipitation for the supply of the system so i do have a quick example about uh decreasing block rates uh so in this case the manufacturer's total consumption was 524 300 gallons for the month uh how much is their consumption charge using the block rate below so you'll see in this case that we have a four-tier block rate a decreasing block rate so you'll see as they go up in units they actually go down in the cost per thousand gallons so their total is 524 524 000 gallons um so as they fill up each block uh they move to the next rate so you'll see that column it says customer volume and block uh 1528 and then in block three they can't fully fill that block uh so they don't go on to block four so instead they stop at block three and you'll see on that total volume column that that volume does add up to their total volume and it has the charges associated with each block and then finally to find the total costs for that consumption charge you will just add all three of those values together um so in this four block system they didn't quite fill all three blocks and their total cost would be 3582.64 cents so i also want to bring up a calendarization so i know this does seem like a long fancy word but it actually has great meaning and it will actually highly impact your utility bills so something to point out is billing periods will depend on the when the utility reads your water meter so they might not read it at the first of the month every single month instead they might read it on the fifth of this month and the eighth of the next month so that's something to keep in mind normalizing that water in sewer data for those billing periods is known as calendarization like i said and the way we find that is we divide the consumption by days and the bills and allocate the water to the calendar month so say that you have three days and the next month so we want to be able to shift that water so that your production and your water consumption line up so that it goes from the first of the month to the last day of the month and to give you just a little bit of a graphic here you'll see that the darker circles are the start dates for the billing period so in december that was 19 uh the 19th and then the 18th and then the 20th so they're all within just a few days but they're all slightly different so you'll see that in december they're really having 30 days on that bill and the january bill had 33 and the next only 24 and what we like to point out is that that isn't going to line up with your production values right so your production values are normally from the first of the month to the end of the month so by doing this calendarization process you get a better understanding of how your production is actually impacting your water to learn more about calendarization i would suggest checking out the baselining guidance document that we've produced and talked about earlier in the month also you can feel free to contact your tam and they can show you how to do this calendarization process and then finally to wrap up let's talk about opportunities that you have for cost and energy savings so how can we save money by just using your bills right so let's not change the volume of water but just changing things about your bills so that first one like i mentioned would be that sewer water metering so let's avoid those sewer costs if we can and meter the outgoing water so that one it's not available for everyone but if you think that your water is being consumed in that manner at your facility this may be a very viable option the second would be that evaporation credit that i mentioned earlier again evaporation doesn't necessarily mean that water has been evaporated it could be injected into the product like i said but it would still qualify for evaporation credit if you don't have a sewer meter every utility is different again if you need help reach out to your facility i'm sure they're willing to help you the third would be discharge water to the appropriate places and what i mean by that is make sure only industrial water is being classified as such so if you are using industrial water um and you're i'm sorry you're discharging that industrial water make sure you're only it discharging the dirty water to that sewer rather you can divert the comfort water that you're using so sinks or kitchens to the regular municipal water and that would save you some money there and on the flip side use suitable source of water so don't use municipal water if you can use industrial water if industrial water meets your needs and does not affect your quality quality of your product or your process look into industrial water it may save you quite a bit of money avoiding late fees like i said sometimes that can be a immediate savings for you by just paying your bill on time the next would be analyzing your water usage so this would be trending your water and seeing anomalies so why is your water spiking in this particular month it may mean a leak it may mean poor practices somewhere that you can uncover just by analyzing your bills the next one is that tax exemption so you might need to do a predominant use study like i said earlier for this one um but it will you know save you some money immediately and then the final one that we recommend is every now and then just recreate your bill pull up your tariff go through your charges line by line from the utility bill and uh see what's going on um there's you know one of three things is going to happen you can either do the calculation and it matches your bill that works right that's what you should get that's what you want to see the second option would be you realize that you're not on the right rate structure so maybe you're being charged for a large industrial room really it should be small industrial and then the final would be the calculation error there's something wrong and then you would go to your utility and try and get that corrected so these are the main ways to save on your water bills without changing that volume of water so that is all i have for today i did include the link down here on this page so if someone would later like to go look at all the resources and guidance documents that we have i just look at the better plants resource library i'm gonna turn that back over to you pete thanks alex and we appreciate that so we still do have a few minutes before our time is up so a quick reminder if you do have questions for alex then please put them in the chat otherwise i will get us started and we'll remind everybody here as we get to the very end about our last webinar coming up on thursday october 28th alex i um it's not really relevant to to what you were talking about but i pulled out my physical bill for my house here which is always a lot simpler than what you mentioned but i i did write down your note every once in a while check your physical bill and you talked about it here just in the last bit about recreating your bills but when that happens and say people don't do it very often and they come talk to their account managers like yourself what is the the main thing i guess that surprises them or the thing that you find out that like oh you could easily make a change on uh so i would say a lot of people are charged their incoming water to equal their sewer water amount right so for residential on your bill there your sewer water volume probably matches your incoming volume um which is normal for a residential place right um but if you're using a lot of water in your process that's something you have to consider your water might just be uh in your product right and you're being charged overcharged for that sewer if you're not careful so that's that's the thing i would think that surprises most people is to see those values equal each other makes perfect sense you you did talk about things you can do without changing the amount of water you use now obviously certainly if you're on one's right structures where you're in a drought prone area or you have other considerations you're probably thinking about you know potentially you know reducing your water usage and then there's all those attendant costs that i really honestly didn't thought of until right now um is that something you guys work with people frequently on in terms of understanding the full benefit that they might get by changing their their water regime if you will right for that uh that's kind of out of the scope for this particular document but the program actually will have some suggestions for water reduction uh so this document actually focused more on not changing that volume right so just the utility analysis however using the pwp tool that i mentioned you will get a better idea of if you do reduce your water how much will you actually save so we do like to point our partners to that pwp tool um to help them understand their true cost of water thank you um you mentioned the different rate structures and i will admit i never heard of a decreasing block rate because that would seem you know antithetical to conservation as you brought up are those the sorts of things that individual entities can negotiate with a utility or is it just kind of a given this is the right structure that the utility offers and and you're stuck with it uh so again that would depend a lot on your particular utility provider so if you are in an extremely rural area with not a lot of customers that is something you can talk to your utility about um so bring it up talk to them they may have a different tariff that you can get on that would make more sense so for you and i as a residential customer you get what you get for that but for the industrial there may be a little wiggle room you just have to ask sometimes so that would be my suggestion on that one all right thank you i appreciate that yeah and i will also say i not really thought about the the diversion issue in terms of your industrial water and how that's counter the industrial sewer actually and how that's counted is that fairly typical is that something that needs to be revisited at a lot of facilities so not all utilities actually provide it um and it is not always available in all regions rather it's something that's going to take a little bit of digging for your own region so in that case you might get water trucked off right so you may have water trucks that come and gather that water and dispense of it in an appropriate manner but in other situations you can have a completely separate sewer system attached to your facility so that is discharged directly to the industrial sewer um again it is a very regional thing um and it's something only in the industrial sector right so it's not something we're going to see um but it all depends on your particular utility but again just ask you never know until you ask there's a lot of things hidden in those tariffs if you're not aware of them right thank you alex has quite a bit to think about and i will say kind of wraps up a three-session series we've had here in terms of looking through your utility bills both your electric bills and your natural gas bills if you have those at your facility so thanks again for all of that i will point everybody out and remind um what alex mentioned for those of you watching this later on especially you can check out the recordings of our previous sessions as well as find all the documentation that she was referring to and that other hosts are referred to at the better building solutions center that is the better building solutions center on the doe website one last thing for those who are watching this live here on october 26th with one more event coming up on thursday that'll be 1 p.m eastern 10 a.m pacific you can find out more about that it's in the chat box right now the link to sign up for that yes events dot com slash energy awareness yesevents.com energy awareness that one i believe will be lessons learned from our better plants goal achievers so there'll be a lot of insight from what other organizations have done maybe one of your organizations has done that we will find out more about on thursday with that thank you again we appreciate you and look forward to seeing you on our last and final energy awareness month webinar on thursday take care have a great rest of your day