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Hyatt Regency New Orleans Ran Its Water Analytics in Phases and Dropped Guest Temperature Complaints Below a Third of Their Old Level
A 50-year-old convention hotel moves an enormous amount of water, making it tempting to measure all water data immediately. Instead, the Hyatt Regency New Orleans intentionally deployed water management in phases. Facing climbing utility bills, pressure complaints, and guests who expect hot water on demand, its engineering team instrumented one measurement first: flow.
Director of Engineering Dr. Adonis Woods joined the Hyatt property in 2022 and ran the analytics to find his biggest operational risk. Water kept surfacing. Working with the water-monitoring firm Nexa, he scoped the building remotely from schematics, then clamped non-invasive ultrasonic meters onto the major trunks where the largest usage was likely hiding. The sensors required no pipe cutting and offered visibility on the loops that mattered most.
Phase one paid off fast. The sensors flagged a water softener discharge line running continuously overnight, plus a leak, both quietly baked into the building's baseline. Nexa's platform alerted the team, plumbers were dispatched, and the water usage dropped. "Start with the most important, highest-value use case," said Brandon Matthies, head of product at Nexa. "Prove that you can be successful there, and then look to expand."
After this win, the team added clamp-on temperature sensors to the hot-water risers, reading down six and seven floors to pinpoint which vertical zones were failing guests. Over a six-month window, surveys complaining about water temperature fell from 150 down to about 43.
Woods paired every alert with a dispatch and pulled his team into reading the data alongside Nexa, so anomalies turned into work orders instead of charts nobody opened. A dashboard can tell you something is off, but the work order that comes out of the dashboard is what triggers real fixes.
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A 50-year-old convention hotel moves an enormous amount of water, making it tempting to measure all water data immediately. Instead, the Hyatt Regency New Orleans intentionally deployed water management in phases. Facing climbing utility bills, pressure complaints, and guests who expect hot water on demand, its engineering team instrumented one measurement first: flow.
Director of Engineering Dr. Adonis Woods joined the Hyatt property in 2022 and ran the analytics to find his biggest operational risk. Water kept surfacing. Working with the water-monitoring firm Nexa, he scoped the building remotely from schematics, then clamped non-invasive ultrasonic meters onto the major trunks where the largest usage was likely hiding. The sensors required no pipe cutting and offered visibility on the loops that mattered most.
Phase one paid off fast. The sensors flagged a water softener discharge line running continuously overnight, plus a leak, both quietly baked into the building's baseline. Nexa's platform alerted the team, plumbers were dispatched, and the water usage dropped. "Start with the most important, highest-value use case," said Brandon Matthies, head of product at Nexa. "Prove that you can be successful there, and then look to expand."
After this win, the team added clamp-on temperature sensors to the hot-water risers, reading down six and seven floors to pinpoint which vertical zones were failing guests. Over a six-month window, surveys complaining about water temperature fell from 150 down to about 43.
Woods paired every alert with a dispatch and pulled his team into reading the data alongside Nexa, so anomalies turned into work orders instead of charts nobody opened. A dashboard can tell you something is off, but the work order that comes out of the dashboard is what triggers real fixes.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.