HEALTH AND SANITATION 29
Images supplied by IAPMO
IAPMO released the Water Demand Calculator ® in 2017 as part of its Water Efficiency and Sanitation Standard( WE • Stand) and the Uniform Plumbing Code( UPC ®).
Early adopter Michael Rogers applied the calculator to Central Station in downtown Phoenix. The project’ s two towers included one 22-story building with 655 beds of student housing, alongside a 33-story building with 362 units of residential housing. The complex arrangement also includes retail and office space that had to share space with an existing light rail system with significantly submerged easements, and a Metropolitan bus stop with“ lots of people coming and going”, Rogers says.
“ City officials had concerns of the level of discharge,” Rogers says of the dense development, which dominates a full city block.“ The diversity factors were not aligning to traditional calculations,” he says, but running various scenarios through the WDC eventually persuaded city officials to accept a reduced pipe fitting. Rogers describes a collaborative process with the municipality, trading scenarios and running them through the WDC. In the end,“ there wasn’ t a special slide, there wasn’ t one long meeting,” Rogers says of the consensus eventually reached.“ We weren’ t trying to reinvent the wheel. We just wanted to understand what the wheel was going to do.”
In Portland, Oregon, the 12-story Julia West House will soon welcome formerly houseless elders and BIPOC individuals earning 30 % or less median income to 90 units. The calculator allowed John Lansing and the PAE team to install a 1½-inch pipe rather than the three-inch
July 2025 Volume 31 I Number 05 www. plumbingafrica. co. za