Epistemic water consumption benchmarks for residential buildings

Identified as one of the key issues in sustainable building designs, freshwater consumption is of primary importance to the design of water systems in buildings. Various benchmarks of water consumption have been developed for the indication and promotion of building sustainability; however, a simple normalization might require precise regional and timing adaptation while a complicated benchmarking model could impose extra adaptation difficulties. In this study, a simple epistemic benchmarking model for residential buildings was formed from existing domestic water consumption patterns and the latest regional survey results. In particular, with various prior estimates from reported water consumption worldwide, a water consumption survey of 60 apartments in Hong Kong was used to formulate a likelihood function for assessing the model validity. The posterior average consumption was compared with the Hong Kong global freshwater consumption patterns to derive the water consumption benchmarks for residential buildings in the region. This epistemic approach would be useful for evaluating the benchmarks of water consumption that is under continuous monitoring. The study also presented a template for formulating epistemic water consumption benchmarks for residential premises elsewhere.