But by reclaiming some of the water, that could be reduced to needing about three to four million gallons a year.
If the hospital reduces water use by 12 or 13 million gallons of water, that’s effectively how much 110 to 120 homes would use, said Adam Koch, Kettering Health Main Campus facility manager and safety officer.
“It’s the right thing to do. We’re trying to be as green as possible and be good stewards of our money,” Koch said.
They started using the new system the first week of April. Groundwater collected in drains in front of Kettering Health Main Campus’ garage is now diverted into the water harvesting system, then cleaned and pumped into the cooling towers.
Before the system’s installation, the groundwater was pumped back into the storm system.
Kettering Health spent $415K on the water harvesting system to improve efficiency and expects a return on that investment in three years.
This could also help the system in the event of a water emergency. In 2019, there were several significant outages in the region between a major water main break in February and then the Memorial Day tornadoes.
“We were fortunate enough to keep water pressure, but it really turned up the heat to say that, ‘hey, if we do lose water pressure in the middle of summer, we can’t cool anything ... this would allow us to keep water for our cooling towers in the event that another major outage happened in the area,” Kock said.
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