Sustainable construction: water efficiency in housing sector

Water resource is essential for life on Earth, therefore it becomes imperative its long-term availability. The impact of the building sector on water resources is obvious through high consumption patterns throughout the buildings life cycle, due to errors made at design phase. One of the goals of sustainable construction is to contribute for the preservation of natural resources by the replacing for materials with lower long-term environmental impact. Although buildings are still not being built in a completely sustainable way, studies focusing on water resource savings and efficient use in the building sector are emerging. On the international and national basis, voluntary certification systems of sustainable construction are being developed, aiming to achieve the preservation of natural resources, through guidelines and recommendations promoting efficiency. This paper, focuses on the assessment of water consumption of individual family housing, and presents a set of measures to reduce the effective water consumption during the operation phase. Those measures consist on the application of flow reducers in the existing devices and the replacement of some equipment for others with better performance. The study adopted a methodology who analyze and compare water consumptions patterns of several devices available for housing sector with the real water consumption levels in a random individual family housing.