Managing an office building is a complicated balance of maintenance, tenant attraction, and maintaining your business tenant satisfaction. In order to say competitive in the commercial real estate market, your building not only needs an appealing location, floor plan, and interior design. You also need an edge.
Every building approaches this challenge differently. Some invest heavily in artwork and designer decorators. Some offer more lenient leases. Some build in-building amenities like gyms and lobby cafes. One interesting and surprisingly effective tactic is to install localized or whole-building water filters during your next building renovation.
Today, we’re here to share a full dozen effective reasons why many office building owners are choosing to add water filtration to the amenities offered to their business tenants.
Lower Maintenance Cost for Water-Running Building
Appliances. One of the biggest reasons why water filtration is a hot office building upgrade is because it benefits both the building and the tenants. Three-stage water filtration handles TDS (total dissolved solids), hard water (scaly mineral water residue), and alkalinity (base-scale chalkiness). With all three covered, perhaps you won’t be surprised to discover that there are some serious maintenance and appliance benefits to your building and the appliances used by tenants.
1) Water Heaters
Water heaters have to be drained and cleared of sediment from time to time and failure to do so can significantly reduce the lifespan of even a commercial-sized water heater. When you install building water filtration in-line between your water heater(s) and the water main, you can extend the life of those water heaters and reduce the amount of maintenance they need due to the reduced amount of sediment in the water that is heated.
2) Building Sprinkler Systems
If your region runs hard water, any sprinklers or fine-spray nozzles in the building systems will eventually clog up and can take permanent damage in the long-term from minerals building up in the tiny holes. With building water filtration, these clogs and damages won’t happen.
3) Humidifiers
Humidifiers work by evaporating water into the air. However, humidifier filters will fill and need changing much more often, and the tanks will need to be frequently cleaned, unless you’re already running filtered water through the system. Building-filtered water allows for appliance-sized humidifiers or saves small personal humidifier users the trouble of keeping a filtered water pitcher.
4) Washing Machines and Dishwashers
Any washing machines or dishwashers also benefit from water filtration. Items will be cleaner because the water is purer when it runs. And, as you might suspect, the machines themselves take less damage over time when there are no hard minerals, floating particles, or alkaline contaminants in the clear water that runs through. Soap suds more readily in filtered water and washes away more cleanly for both dishes and fabrics.
5) Tenant Appliances like Coffee Makers
Even your tenants will notice the difference as their business appliances, from steam irons to coffee makers, run more efficiently and require less maintenance from the building’s pre-filtered water.
Provide Luxury Amenity to Business Tenants
Installing a building-wide water filtration unit during your next renovation will be highly appealing to your office tenants as well. Office building tenants tend to have high standards and are very responsive to things that are perceived as a luxury. And delicious pre-filtered water is definitely a luxury, especially in high-population offices with many people to keep hydrated on water, tea, and coffee.
6) Tenants Love the Idea of Complimentary Filtered Water
First of all, office building tenants are often aware of the dangers of unfiltered water in the building taps and know that complimentary filtered water is a type of luxury. If filtered water is brought up during the negotiation stage, most will see this as a minor but persuasive perk as it will benefit them both immediately and in the long-term in appliance maintenance costs, employee satisfaction, and the ability to offer practically free filtered tap water to customers or guests.
7) Save Tenants the Monetary and Environmental Cost of Bottled Water
Modern businesses spend thousands of dollars (and thousands of bottles) on bottled water every year. It’s expected of them to provide cold filtered water to clients, visiting business partners, and simply to keep their high-level employees happy. Many will also see provided filtered water as an opportunity to not only save money on palettes of bottled water, but also as a chance to “go green” by avoiding the thousands of disposed of clear plastic bottles along the way.
8) Coffee Tastes Better with Clean Tap Water
Coffee is a big deal in any office building, and many thousands of gallons of coffee will be prepared from tap water by office employees in your building each year. And many of those coffee-makers care passionately about the quality of their water. Some keep a filtered pitcher just for coffee, some have resorted to using bottled water to get that fresh, clean coffee taste. But you can provide something better. Deliciously clean coffee-ready water straight out of the tap. No additional steps or expenses needed to make pure-coffee-flavored coffee (or tea, or hot cocoa) in every break room in the building.
9) Safe and Delicious Water for Cooking or Washing Fruit
If your office building tenants cook in their break rooms or enjoy fresh fruit as part of their daily break-time snacks, your filtered water is once again useful. Clean, clear water not only tastes better when used to cook or wash fruit, but it also is more effective at getting pots, pans, and dishes clean. And if your tenants include cafes or other food/drink serving venues, filtered water is an invaluable asset for providing top-quality consumables.
10) Safe Pre-Filtered Water for Business Functions
Then, as we mentioned before, there’s the benefit to office appliances. From commercial laundry items to the break room dishwasher, tenants will enjoy not having to worry about scale build-up from hard water or damage from heavily alkaline water because the tap water running through those appliances is pre-filtered.
Low Additional Maintenance Concerns
Last but not least are your inevitable concerns about maintenance. Many building owners and managers are worried that adding a water filtration system during the renovation will increase the cost and hassle of maintaining the building infrastructure. Fortunately, this is not a significant concern. Water filtration requires less maintenance than your HVAC system and on about the same schedule.
11) Change Out System Filters on Your HVAC Schedule
When you call for your annual or twice-annual HVAC maintenance visits, this is the perfect time to call for water filtration maintenance as well. When you change out your HVAC filters, add changing the water filters to the routine. You might be surprised just how little a new water filtration system will impact your already set maintenance routine.
12) Occasionally Clean and Restock Filtration Unit(s)
Like a water heater, your water filtration unit may need to be cleaned and restocked with filter medium from time to time, depending on the type of water filter unit you choose. In this way, your water filter maintenance can ride along with your water heater maintenance. When you schedule a water heater cleaning, schedule a water filter cleaning as well.
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If your office building has a renovation scheduled in the near future, naturally you are considering a variety of building improvement options. This is your chance to make your office building even more appealing to business tenants big and small. Whether you’re looking for new residents of your lobby cafe or to book a nice big law firm on your upper floors, filtered water is a luxury that many tenants will consider a serious benefit to an office building. After all, who else gets bottled-water-quality water running practically free from the taps?
For more information about office building water filtration systems and how to make the right decision for your upcoming renovation, please contact us today! Our water experts will be happy to walk you through the units, maintenance, and benefits of each business-class water filtration option. Or, if you’d rather, you can retrofit your sinks with local filters and we can help you with that, too.