The Office of Sustainability’s Living Lab projects often give us an opportunity to investigate long-standing issues at the university from the ground up. Water conservation is a concern at the university with the currently high usage of water and the predicted rise in future municipal water prices, and the Biology Building is a particularly troublesome case. An older building home to research equipment with substantial water usage, the Biology Building is the largest consumer of water on campus relative to its size. This is why the Biology Building was chosen by a group of mechanical engineering students in 2014 to identify opportunities to re-design water consuming systems for conservation purposes.

Minghan Chu, Shaun Ng, Connor Sproule, and Adam Van Rees were members of a design project group formed in their Mechanical Engineering 495.6 class. After conducting an assessment of water usage in the building, undergoing tours and interviews with the building’s occupants, and performing an analysis of historical data, the students were able to identify the key drivers of water consumption in the Biology Building. Inefficient washroom fixtures were identified as a contributor to the problem and suggestions for washroom re-designs including efficient dual flush toilets and urinals fitted with infrared sensors were submitted. The largest contributor to water waste in the Biology Building however was a tougher issue to examine.

The Biology Building’s research facilities currently require substantial water use to achieve their goals. It was identified that the use of water-cooled growth chambers accounted for 45.9% of the building’s annual water usage. Growth chambers are pivotal pieces of equipment for a number of the researches in the building and their replacement carries the possibility to disrupt many current research methods. After speaking with the researchers in the building and identifying the needs of these projects, the students were able to make recommendations to replace the existing water-cooled growth chambers with air-cooled growth chambers that were estimated to save 30.9 million L of water per year, which would save the university over $60,000 annually in water costs. The project’s payback period was calculated to be 10 years (8.3 if the trend of increasing water costs was accounted for) and provided many great recommendations for future efforts to revitalize the Biology Building.

This sort of work helps to remind us of the unique challenges the university often faces when approaching issues in water or energy conservation. As a research institution, the university must consider the special needs of its faculty when considering how to move forward. These needs may be foreign to an individual looking to increase the energy or water efficiency of their home, but can mean the difference between success and failure for years of research on campus. Student participation in the Living Lab program helps us not only to highlight these issues, but to use ingenuity and creativity in identifying sustainable solutions for the future.