Lee Hoffman is the co-founder of Runwise and has been building tech companies since 2004. Over the past decade at Runwise, he's helped more than 10,000 buildings cut utility costs by 23% with a smart operating system that installs wirelessly, without renovations. He writes about the operational realities of running efficient buildings, from heating, cooling, and water systems to climate compliance.
Skip to content

Don't Install Low Flow Toilets

Are you ready for a mind-blowing fact?

Those low-flow toilets every city has required actually aren't the solution to saving water in most buildings.

The primary source of water waste is running toilets

In most buildings, the primary source of water waste isn't the flush, it's the toilets that are constantly running and nobody reports them. One study even found that 51% of toilet water was being lost to running toilets. A single running toilet in a building can be up to $10,000 a year on average of water usage, and almost every building out there has several of them.

The common wisdom is wrong — swapping fixtures isn't the fix

Low-flow toilets get marketed as the easy money saver for most buildings. Swap the fixture, cut water, boom, you're done. The smarter move is to keep toilets that residents actually like using and cut the water bill by catching running toilets fast.

Smart toilet monitoring finds every running toilet — fast

Recent advances in wireless and battery technology make a radical new solution possible, and it's called smart toilet monitoring. Smart toilet monitoring puts wireless sensors on every single toilet in just seconds and instantly tells you where every single running toilet is. Once you know where the running toilets are, you can fix them instantly and literally cut 20% of your water bill overnight. In fact, the whole system often pays for itself in just months.

Smarter (instead of new) toilets = better investment

That ROI is dramatically better than replacing existing working toilets with low-flow toilets. Making your toilets smarter instead of low-flow is a win-win-win. It's a better experience for tenants, a better experience for management, and ultimately better for your building's budget.