Before investing in a new wash bay water recycling system, it’s important to understand how your operation is currently using water, and where efficiency savings could be made. A structured water audit will help identify inefficiencies, highlight opportunities for savings, and provide a realistic foundation for your ROI calculations. Whatever type of vehicle wash systems you operate, the steps below will help you evaluate your water usage to make an informed decision about long-term improvements.
Start by documenting how and where water flows throughout your site. Make note of all your supply points, wash equipment, drainage routes, and any existing treatment or separation systems. For most vehicle wash bays – including large-scale train wash systems – water is used in several stages: pre-rinse, detergent application, high pressure wash, final rinse, and equipment cleaning. Mapping the stages clarifies the total number of water-using activities and highlights areas where consumption might be higher than expected. For train wash systems in particular, large surface areas and extended wash cycles make this initial mapping essential for assessing your potential savings.
Many facilities are surprised – often unpleasantly – by the volume of water they actually consume, with some businesses experiencing long-term wastage that is only picked up following the audit. So, the second step is to gather reliable data on how much water your wash operation genuinely uses. This may come from water meter readings, bills, on-site flow meters or so on. Make this as accurate as possible, measuring usage over a representative period of 1 to 3 months. Break the data down per vehicle, per day, or per wash cycle as appropriate. This allows you to benchmark performance and compare consumption with industry norms. Accurate measurement will also help identify any hidden issues, such as leaks, inefficient nozzles, or excessively long rinse cycles.
With your consumption data in hand, assess where water is wasted or used inefficiently on site. Common areas to consider include:
Anomalous water usage over and above what is expected could indicate a leak or a mechanical fault in your wash system, so this should be reviewed as quickly as possible. For large fleet depots and rolling stock, even small inefficiencies repeated across hundreds of washes can waste large volumes of water and increased operating costs.
Once your inefficiencies are noted and understood, you can start calculating your recycling potential and savings – i.e., how much water your operation could realistically reclaim. A wash bay water recycling system typically captures and treats water from wash pads, sedimentation pits and drainage channels. Depending on your site layout, some systems can reuse a significant proportion of this water for pre-wash, under chassis, or high-pressure wash stages. There are three stages to estimating your potential recovery volume:
This estimation will give you broad picture of how much mains water expenditure could be offset through recycling.
Finally, combine your consumption data, inefficiency reports, and recycling potential to estimate your expected savings from investing in a wash bay water recycling system. ROI calculations should consider savings from:
These calculations will help you build a solid business case for upgrading or installing a vehicle wash system that incorporates modern water reclamation technology.
If you’d like to find out how investing in a water recycling system could deliver long-term returns at your facility, please contact one of the Britannia team today by clicking here.
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