Las Vegas Resort Casino

Being a leader in sustainability has always been important to this Las Vegas resort casino. Several years ago, the company created a sustainability division to help monitor and reduce electricity, natural gas and water consumption. While it was “easier, but never easy” to improve its usage of electricity and natural gas, water has been more difficult.

Initially, the company set construction standards, installed smart irrigation systems, desert landscaping and low-flow sinks, shower heads and toilets to help support water conservation efforts. At the same time, it was constantly searching for new ways to better monitor water usage at its pools, spas, commercial kitchens and cooling towers.

The company identified four areas where they were most interested in applying the technology to monitor and measure water use at the property: cooling towers, the water feature, pools and spas and hot water applications.

Twelve sensors were installed. Pipes had to be cut in a few places, but most were outfitted with high precision exterior pipe meters. These meters are mounted to the outside of water pipes and are calibrated specifically to account for pipe material and thickness so measurements are exact.

Currently, the system is monitoring data every minute from each water meter. Apana LiNK™ radios connected to each water meter send data across the resort to two Apana LiNK™ Gateways. Gateways push data through a secure cellular VPN link directly to Apana’s cloud-based analytics engine.

This information produces a “water fingerprint” that is unique to each area of the property. It allows the company to see waste events when they are happening. This gives operations executives a huge advantage because staff can take action.

Measuring Water

Water data is collected from four main areas across the property operation:

Now operations gets meaningful insights and actionable information to the right staff when they need it. Through waste reduction and operational insights, the system helped reduce water use 16% for fountain operations and 34% for pool operations.

This was the first time the company could quantify how many gallons of water were being used for specific maintenance tasks. The company believes it may be able to cut the number of gallons used by 10%, 20% or even 50% in the future and validate it.

Other use cases include identifying mechanical failures such as relief valves on hot water heaters or the critical functions of the make-up and blowdown valves on cooling towers.