Simulating Community Water Use Behavior And Potential Water Conservation
Using Detailed End Use Event Data
Abstract
We present a model of indoor residential water use that estimates water
demand and conservation potential by end use for a target community by
simulating indoor water end use events at a household level. The model
uses end use event data from a set of representative residential
households to simulate a larger community and advances existing end use
models by: 1) accounting for an expanded set of indoor water end uses;
2) considering the variability in flowrates, durations, and volumes for
end use events over different days of the week; and 3) providing a
generalized approach for simulating indoor water usage and potential
conservation at the city level. The model simulates residential water
use behavior in individual households by randomly sampling water end use
events for different end use types for each day of the week and then
aggregating the sampled water end use events per day to estimate the
daily water use per household. We used the model to evaluate a set of
technological and behavioral conservation actions to quantify the
conservation potential in each simulated household as well as aggregated
to the city level. We evaluated the performance of the model in
predicting the observed average daily water use of households in Logan
City, Utah, USA and compared against other common water demand models to
demonstrate the model’s reliability. The results of this paper are
reproducible using openly available code and data, representing an
accessible platform for advancing water demand modeling using detailed
water end use data.