4 types of water for commercial servicing

There are four types of water that Secondwind’s commercial water experts treat and service. Commercial service types of water include:

• Drinking
• Utility
• Domestic
• Process

While your business may not rely on each type of water for servicing, it may be helpful to understand the functionality and purpose of each when it comes to the services Secondwind provides. 

Drinking water

We treat consumable water differently than the other types of water. For example, we might treat the water going to bubblers for removing arsenic but not treat the sinks and toilets.

This is a common approach when there are chemicals or contaminants in the water making it unsafe to drink but is safe for bathing and other uses. We treat schools for high fluoride, arsenic and per- and polyfluoroalkyl- substances (PFAS) with this approach. Doing so can reduce  capital costs by tens of thousands of dollars and annual operating costs by thousands.

We recently treated a school for arsenic and PFAS this way:

• The school uses 800-1,000 gallons per day, but they only use 20-50 gallons of drinking water, so the operating cost is 95% less than treating all the water.
• The treatment was $10,000 less, even after they paid a plumber to run parallel plumbing.

Domestic water 

Domestic water is used in a home or a commercial building primarily for bathing, laundry, cleaning and for toilets. It can also include the drinking water as sometimes we treat both in the same way. This is our most common treatment when we treat all of the water.

Utility water 

Utility water is for boilers, humidifiers, sterilizers and other equipment that has specific water quality requirements. We will sometimes install a softener or perform reverse osmosis or deionization prior to humidifiers or sterilizers. The steps are:

• We evaluate the water quality requirements as specified by the manufacturer
• We look at the water supply
• Then we determine what treatment is necessary 

Process water 

Process water is used in manufacturing such as deionized water used to rinse parts or washing water to clean glass for a window manufacturer. For example, we are working with Harvey Windows in Londonderry to automate the addition of a detergent to their glass washing machine by adding one ounce of detergent to every 10 gallons of water going into the machine.

Our certified water specialists can answer any questions about the four types of water, or we can do a free site evaluation.