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Simulating Community Water Use Behavior And Potential Water Conservation Using Detailed End Use Event Data
  • Nour A. Attallah,
  • Jeffery S. Horsburgh
Nour A. Attallah
Utah State University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Jeffery S. Horsburgh
Utah State University
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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.