We recognize that the water we use is sourced differently in our communities, either lake water or ground source, but that doesn’t change the importance of managing our water usage and addressing stormwater management in each location.

We started our water focus by installing real-time monitoring of our usage with the Flowie, from Alert Labs. This allows us to receive alerts when there is unusual water usage such as a leak within our buildings or an issue with our irrigation systems. Before the Flowie, the only indicator we had of a problem was a spike in our water bills and that may not be known until 30 days past the incident occurring.

Next on our water journey is to look at managing stormwater better. Not only do April showers bring May flowers, but they can also bring some of those severe storms that are becoming more commonplace. At our locations, we have lots of roof surface that routes rainwater to the stormwater systems. We will be exploring solutions to find ways to divert some of this water and use it for irrigation and other purposes.

Later this year when temperatures cool off again, we will be looking at salt management for winter maintenance and how to minimize the impact on the ground source water table.

Next time on Tepperman’s X Sustainability, we’ll be talking about our partnership with Habitat for Humanity and how we collaborate to divert waste. In the meantime, you can learn more about sustainability at Tepperman’s by visiting our sustainability page or by reviewing our most recent sustainability report.