Summer is just about upon us, and that means air-conditioning use begins in earnest.

This new chart pulled from our data set shows the water and electricity consumption for 55 Market Street over an 8-year period. This is a 20-story building in downtown Sydney, built in 1990. The top dark blue line is maximum mean temperature for the month in NSW. You can click the graph to see the original visualisation.

Water and electricity use by 55 Market Street, Sydney against maximum mean temperature for NSW

This building shows really valuable reductions in energy and water use because of the work of the building manager and the interaction of technologies in the building.

We demonstrated in an earlier post how air-conditioning is responsible for the most electricity consumption in office towers. The air-con is discharging the heat it draws out of building into cooling towers, which work by evaporating water. Cooling towers typically account for 30% of a commercial office building's water use.

Of course, if you use less air-conditioning you don’t need as much electricity, but you also don’t need as much water to circulate through the cooling towers. Efficiency comes from a mix of technologies like good glazing or sensor lights but also from managing the occupants' behaviour, like enabling energy saving modes on equipment.

This means that landlords and tenants can get flow-on benefits from a base building that is managed more efficiently.

This is just one example of building performance drawn from our datalyzer - the first part of Green Buildings Alive effort to improve the property sector through transparency and action research.

Do you have experience in managing water consumption in buildings? We’d love to hear from you.