A new study suggests that commercial buildings with low-flow water design could have safety issues when it comes to water quality, in part due to water sitting stagnant for longer periods of time.

Researchers studied the water quality in a three-storey commercial building in Indiana over three weekends between January and February 2020.

Their goal was to find out if water quality changed over the weekend when less people were in the building, and thus even less water than usual was moving through the pipes.

The answer appears to be yes, according to the findings published Wednesday in the journal PLOS Water. 

“Weekend stagnation influenced chemical and biological water quality, with clear differences in several parameters on Friday, after a week of use, and Monday, after a weekend with relatively little use,” the study stated.

Although the study was conducted prior to the pandemic, the findings bring up concerns that commercial buildings which sat nearly empty for months during lockdowns could still have lingering water quality issues stemming from that time.

The building that researchers looked at was one of the more than 100,000 buildings in the U.S. that has a green certification with the United States Green Building Council. These are buildings that were designed, among other things, to reduce the amount of water being used for tasks compared to regular buildings, all in the name of making the building more eco-conscious.

This means less water flows through the plumbing. But while this can have benefits of conserving water, there are questions that remain about what affect this could have on the quality of the water.

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