Darwin Escapes

Darwin Escapes manage 26 sites across the UK, ranging from golf resorts to holiday home parks. A detailed programme of water use monitoring and leak detection has been implemented in the last 10 years, resulting in a significant reduction in both water use and cost.

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Darwin Escapes manage 26 sites across the UK, ranging from golf resorts to holiday home parks. All of these sites have a large water demand, some of which is paid for the Darwin Escapes and some by residents. Kris Sutton, the Groups Grounds and Utilities Manager, set up an ambitious data logger installation programme across the group's sites after a number of bad experiences with large water bills. This was initiated in 2009 after one site had extremely large water bills that year, going from £30k-£140k caused by a leak. This was not picked up sooner as the utility company operated a 6-month billing process. Once loggers were installed the leak was quickly pinpointed and repaired. The loggers showed that leak onsite had been losing 12m³ an hour for at least 6 months (roughly 50,000m³total). Currently, all 26 sites under Kris's remit now have automatic usage and flow sensors which continually upload data to a central cloud data point. Each site has a slightly different set up, but in general each site is spilt into zones with sub-meters, allowing leaks to be pinpointed much more accurately and rapidly. Everyday Kris receives an email at around 11am which details the previous 24 hours usage of each site. This is then compared to baseline usage for the site between 2-4am (at which point water use should be minimal) and historic data in order to highlight any unusual trends. This allows any problems to be rapidly investigated and solved. The level of data provided by the system is so detailed that it can detect the type of leak to be diagnosed, for example a single tap left on, or a full burst pipe, further reducing the time and effort spent fixing the problem. Each data logger costs around £1.20 a day to operate. However, the savings made from early diagnose of leaks and wasted water means that this system more than pays for itself. This type of system can also be scaled very easily, allowing it to be used at an individual facility, or over many different sites.