Multi-site and split-site school estates
Across several sites the cheapest leak to find is the one identified from consumption data before anyone reports it, by comparing every school's holiday floor in one place.
The comparison that finds leaks without a contractor
A single school has nothing to compare itself against except its own history. A group of schools has something much better: a set of buildings on similar calendars, with similar patterns, whose consumption can be ranked side by side.
Rank every site by its August consumption per pupil. The schools at the top of that list are not the biggest. They are the ones losing water. That exercise costs nothing, needs no equipment, and can be done from bills alone.
Two schools in the same group across one year, indexed to a term-time weekday. Each band is the range that site moves through in a week. Both fall in the holidays; only one reaches the floor, and the distance between the two floors is a constant loss running every hour of the year. Illustrative of the pattern; it carries no measured volumes.
A programme rather than a series of emergencies
| Stage | What happens | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| Collect | Twelve months of consumption for every site, from bills or from the retailer's interval data | Estates or finance, once |
| Rank | Order sites by holiday and weekend floor, not by total consumption | Estates, in a spreadsheet |
| Survey | Investigate the top of the list first, not the site that shouted loudest | Contractor, on the worst sites |
| Repair | Fix, and record what was found and what it was losing | Contractor and site team |
| Re-baseline | Take the floor again after the repair, so the saving is evidenced | Estates |
Split sites and campuses
A split-site school has the same problem in a smaller form: a run between two sites that neither site team thinks of as theirs. Those runs are where losses last longest, because responsibility for them is genuinely ambiguous.
The fix is administrative before it is technical. Write down which site holds each meter, which valve isolates each building, and who checks. Then sub-meter the buildings that consume legitimately out of hours, so the rest of the estate reads zero and any flow is a leak.
One contract, one contact, one report format
The practical benefit of buying at group level is not a discount. It is that every survey comes back in the same format, so a trust can compare sites rather than compare contractors, and that one person knows the estate rather than eleven people each knowing one school.