Drinking water wastage through sanitary equipment

Abstract

Considering the climatic changes,the overall urbanization problems and the technological advances, drinking water demand shouldalwaysbea matter to research yet. In developing countries,many people still do not get drinking water enough to satisfy their basic needs.There is not sufficient technical information to apply in water management in order to optimize drinking water consumption(DWC)and to distribute it better. This study identifies the correlation between DWC and sanitary devices (SD). It provides some models to calculate the DWC by knowing how many SD there are in a residential building. The primary data obtained from 11 Ecuadorean cities, contains information about social, economic, climatic, demographic and anthropogenic characteristics,as well as DWCduring 6 months.Some SD outliers handled withBox plots. Through descriptive statistical assessment we got some lineal models with a perfect or very strong correlation (R>0.75; p values<0.05)in big cities. In medium cities, the Sanitaryequipment (SE) is usedto calculate the DWC by another lineal model (R=0.4315; p-value=0.0097).Thesemathematical models areimportant toolsto define DWC optimization policies. The DWC increases because the number of SD increaseen medium and big cities.Water wastageoccursthrough excessive SD in the residential buildings.

Keywords

• consumption
• drinking water
• sanitary devices
• wastage
• water