Smart Sanitation Pilot Project with Vebego AG

Sustainable shopping malls become smart

‍As a leading provider of real estate facility management services, Vebego AG, based in Zurich, provides cleaning and maintenance services for large real estate property owners. Commercial buildings typically have high cleaning needs linked to a high number of visitors they receive across an extended timespan.

To guarantee even higher hygiene and cleanliness standards in times of pandemic whilst leveraging sustainable water usage practices, Vebego recently launched a pilot project in a large shopping center in Switzerland, where Droople’s Water Intelligence Platform featuring Smart Sanitation Solution was installed.

VEBEGO AG: Sustainability in focus

Vebego AG, based in Zurich, consists of operations spanning Switzerland, the Principality of Liechtenstein, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This family business focuses its service philosophy on quality, environment, and safety, whilst the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and particularly SDG13 for Climate Action, where all are key components to the company strategy.

In March 2021. Vebego began a pilot project with Droople to enhance its company’s sustainable water usage. Droople’s Smart Sanitation Solution works as a driver for the simultaneous achievement of two ambitious goals:

(1) provide the highest quality of service and hygiene while (2) contributing to significant water savings.

This solution not only provides remote monitoring and analysis of water usage data, but also allows for actionable diagnosis to further improve current sanitation programs, Improvements such as optimizing cleaning schedules in shopping centers via flow and temperature sensors; sub-metering common areas preventing legionella risk levels via water stagnation monitoring.

Improving the quality of service and hand hygiene

The first phase of the pilot included an installation of 28 Droople sensors throughout the shopping centre. The pilot spanned 7 months, where the system continuously gathered and analyzed water-related data from smart flow and temperature sensors.

Despite the reduced customer traffic related to the pandemic, the analysis of the first data batch showed an intensive use of the premises. The data also revealed that women restroom usage is four times more intensive than the men’s restroom, with a characteristic peak at 3 p.m.

Effectiveness of sanitary checks

To help improve hygiene and level of service, the Water Intelligence Platform identified four typical daily usage profiles:

1. Monday: weak restroom usage
2. Mid-week: normal use
3. Friday: heavy usage, long opening hours
4. Saturday: heavy usage, short opening hours

Based on four daily profiles, the platform assessed the maximum number of times the restroom was used between two sanitary checks. This allowed our customer to establish an ideal control schedule corresponding to usage profiles.

The Droople Smart Sanitation Solution is also capable of using historical data to define a typical usage profile for a specific restroom. These profiles help detect any unexpected usage drop in real time.

Detection of blocked flushes

Continuous monitoring also allowed Vebego to identify 2 leaks, one of which if left untreated would have resulted in continuous leakage over the weekend. This example shows important saving potential using continuous monitoring systems, which feature real-time issue identification and timely alarm benchmarks that allow for a rapid fix.

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"The analysis of the first batch of data is very promising. We are confident that the relaxation of the sanitary restrictions will provide an even more representative dataset, confirming the high relevance of Droople’s Smart Sanitation Solution.

The hygiene indicators provided by the Droople Water Intelligence Platform allow us to produce a real-time hygiene score for the buildings we manage. We at Vebego believe that the large-scale implementation of smart water monitoring solutions will increase the awareness of water and energy conservation among the public." Thorsten Michels, Director of Facility Management Suisse Romande, Vebego

Audit period: 2 months

Anomaly found: 2 events detected

Water usage: 262'300 liters

Potential water savings: 7.5% total consumption / year

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