Water Solutions with Chem-Aqua

(This podcast was originally conducted for MarketScale's Building Management Podcast.)

This episode of MarketScale's Building Management Podcast explores an interesting cause and effect within the industry. In the last several years, the push for more green water conservation initiatives has created an unexpected issue in home and building water supplies. With conservative toilet flushes, low-flow shower heads, and automatic sinks, water is left sitting in piping for longer periods of time, creating perfect environments for waterborne pathogens to thrive.

This issue has appeared almost parallel to another evolution in the Industrial Water Treatment Industry, one that’s putting a focus on public health instead of just asset management. In this episode of the Building Management podcast, we continue our discussion on pathogens that exist within our water supplies, and how they’re causing a ripple effect that changing the Commercial, Hospitatlity, Real Estate, and Tourism industries. Chem-Aqua’s Manager of Water Risk Management Services Group, Dominck Tuzzo explains how competing interests complicate solving the pathogen problem and the risk that now presents itself to building owners and facility managers.

“Man-made premise plumbing systems are the perfect breeding ground for these Opportunistic Premise Plumbing Pathogens, or OPPPs, to breed, colonize, and rapidly amplify in our building systems,” said Tuzzo. He also makes the argument that efficiency is not always the safest option for the consumer. Tuzzo elaborates on the Legionnaire’s outbreak in the 2010s, the rise in energy saving technology, and the shift in responsibility in the industry.

(This podcast was originally conducted for MarketScale's Building Management Podcast.)

Imagine a building undergoing renovations, needing to shut off some water pipes and therefore leading to a dead leg of piping. Now imagine, once the renovations are completed, that water is flushed right back into the system. You may have just put a pathogen in your entire building’s water supply. When it comes to water treatment, whether on a domestic or processing side, simple choices can have drastic effects, for better or for worse, and no one knows this better than our guest today, Tony Self.

“As water flows past that dead-leg, it will pick up whatever pathogens may be growing there. It just needs an opportunity for somebody to become exposed,” Self said. Self, Director of Engineering for Chem-Aqua Incorporated, came on this episode of MarketScale's Building Management Podcast to discuss the challenges that come with keeping both consumers and workers safe around potential water pathogens, the effect of increases in government regulation on small businesses, and how users and facility operators can make small decisions to have big, positive impacts.