This past summer, a Legionella outbreak in Central Harlem killed seven people and sickened 114 others. The New York City Health Department identified the bacteria in 12 cooling towers across 10 buildings, including Harlem Hospital and a construction site for the city's new public health laboratory. While remediation efforts contained the outbreak, it serves as a stark reminder of how water systems—when left unmonitored—can become deadly.
Water failures can disrupt operations overnight—from a burst pipe cascading through tenant floors to unsafe hot water loops triggering health risks. Despite this, water remains the least digitized building system.
This article explores why water deserves attention now, how the marketplace is evolving, and what building owners should know about water management.
If you’ve been in a building's mechanical room lately, then the disparity is immediately clear. HVAC systems have dashboards, sensors, and control systems generating streams of data. Water systems? Usually just pipes, valves, and a monthly utility bill.
Brandon Matthies, Head of Product at Nexa (by Watts Water), describes a common scenario: “a leak starts on a Friday evening in a 70-story commercial building after tenants have left for the weekend. By Monday morning, water has cascaded down 20 floors, causing extensive damage that could have been prevented with early detection”.
This blind spot creates multiple risks operating in the dark:
Catastrophic leaks: A slow basement leak that goes unnoticed can cost tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, mold remediation, lost rental income, and increased insurance premiums. Insurance companies are taking notice—some now require leak detection systems as part of their underwriting criteria, while others offer premium credits for installing these systems.
Health and safety risks: The Harlem outbreak isn't an isolated case. Legionnaires' disease can be caused by plumbing systems where conditions are favorable for Legionella growth, such as cooling towers, hot water tanks, and evaporative condensers of large air-conditioning systems. Without continuous monitoring, building owners can't detect when water temperatures drift into dangerous zones.
Regulatory compliance: States are moving beyond recommendations. California now requires all new multifamily construction (two or more units) to include water submeters for each individual unit. Similar regulations are spreading to other states.
The fragmentation makes these problems worse. Irrigation, domestic hot water, cooling towers, and plumbing loops operate as separate systems, rarely connected or monitored holistically. Water monitoring can feel a bit like we’re back in 1999 with facility managers walking around with clipboards, manually reading gauges and taking notes—if they're monitoring anything at all.
The market is developing a different approach. Recognizing this widespread lack of water visibility, the market is developing a different approach. Instead of requiring owners to install a full building automation system before digitizing water metering, vendors are offering targeted, non-invasive sensors that can be installed directly on specific water systems. This creates a shortcut that lets owners get immediate visibility into their most pressing water risks without the cost and complexity of comprehensive building automation.
Matthies explains that “Nexa's approach is to work with any brand of equipment”. To monitor a domestic hot water loop, for example, they simply place temperature sensors before and after the equipment and in strategic points throughout the loop to gain visibility into system performance.
This represents a fundamental shift in how building owners can think about digitizing their operations. Rather than starting with a comprehensive BAS and adding water points later, they can begin with their highest-risk water systems and expand from there.
This approach also reveals gaps in traditional building system categories. Cooling towers for example, technically belong to HVAC systems but often aren't tracked well even when a BAS exists. Intelligent water management allows owners to capture this data independently, bridging gaps between traditional building system silos.
Intelligent water management transforms water from a utility bill line item into a managed building asset. The category encompasses three main approaches:
Protecting property against water risks: This includes leak detection systems that can automatically shut off water when problems arise, temperature monitoring to prevent Legionella growth, and pressure monitoring to detect system failures before they cause damage. As Maili Neverosky, who leads the commercial side of water metering company Metron, explains: "We provide one-minute-data on leak detection. Being able to have, almost to the minute, insight when you are getting an anomaly in your leak detection can save companies thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases."
Managing plumbing and hydronic systems: Non-invasive sensors for temperature, pressure, and flow can reveal how domestic hot water loops, hydronic heating systems, and cooling towers actually perform. This data integrates with equipment like boilers and digital mixing valves for enhanced control capabilities.
Water system sustainability: Whole-building and sub-metering water use helps identify waste in cooling towers, irrigation, and tenant consumption while providing data needed for increasingly common sustainability reporting requirements.
The technology exists today and costs have dropped significantly.
JT Sabine, Customer Success Manager at Nexa, describes a typical deployment: “typically within hours a customer's water systems can be outfitted with non-invasive temperature, pressure, flow, and leak sensors. For example, a couple of temperature sensors gives us full visibility into a domestic hot water loop. These can be installed by the facility engineer themselves, providing immediate visibility into water system performance.
This isn't theoretical technology requiring massive infrastructure investments. Most systems can be installed non-invasively, with sensors that clamp onto existing pipes and connect wirelessly to cloud platforms. The barriers that once made water monitoring prohibitively complex have largely disappeared.
The intelligent water management marketplace remains fragmented, with most vendors offering point solutions rather than comprehensive platforms. For example: irrigation controls, leak detection systems, sub-meters, and water quality testing—each solving one problem but missing the bigger picture, is the marketplace status-quo.
A smaller group of companies are beginning to connect these building blocks into more integrated approaches. Brandon Matthies explains Nexa's strategy: "We think of intelligent water management within a building as encompassing multiple building blocks—sensors to read existing building meters, flow metering for sub-metering throughout the facility, leak detection, water system monitoring, and direct equipment integration for control”.
Nexa positions itself as working across multiple categories simultaneously—metering, flow measurement, leak detection, plumbing loop monitoring, and equipment integration. Their goal is giving facility managers a unified view of how water systems perform across the entire building.
Metron emphasizes high-frequency metering and anomaly detection, with particular strength in verifying billing accuracy and benchmarking water use across property portfolios. "We have been collecting water data for over 30 years," says Neverosky. "So we understand how it flows, where it flows, that and the data piece is very important when you're looking at any property."
The result is a marketplace in transition. Many single-purpose solutions exist for specific problems, while a few players attempt to knit together a complete water management story.
This fragmentation creates both opportunities and challenges for building owners. On one hand, they can start with their most pressing need—whether that's leak detection, sub-metering, or equipment monitoring—without committing to a comprehensive platform. On the other hand, they risk creating new data silos that don't communicate with each other or with other building systems—though some vendors are addressing this concern. Metron, for example, offers WaterScope DataLink, a programmable software interface that allows their water consumption data to be pulled into other applications, reducing integration barriers.
Not every building owner needs intelligent water management with the same urgency. A small office building with basic restrooms faces different risks than a 40-story hotel or a multifamily complex with hundreds of units. But for certain property types, water digitization is shifting from optional to essential.
Hotels and hospitality properties face immediate guest satisfaction issues when water systems fail. "The biggest driver is whether guest rooms have the right water temperature and pressure. Then it typically is responding to a massive spike in their water bill without any visibility into why and do I have risk with scalding my guests,," explains Matthies. When hot water delivery fails in a hotel, guest complaints follow immediately—and those complaints directly impact revenue.
Multifamily housing presents compelling economics around tenant billing and portfolio benchmarking. Property managers can move from estimating water costs per unit to precisely measuring individual consumption. Matthies notes that Nexa continues expanding its platform capabilities to serve these properties.
Large commercial properties increasingly face insurance requirements that make leak detection systems mandatory rather than optional. For certain categories of business where the potential for property damage and business interruption losses is exceptionally high, some insurance carriers may not offer coverage unless water sensor systems are installed.
Healthcare facilities must navigate Legionella risk and compliance requirements. These facilities can't afford the liability exposure that comes with unmonitored water systems, particularly when serving vulnerable populations.
Educational institutions represent a unique case, as university campuses typically combine all of the above property types. A single campus might include dormitories requiring tenant-level sub-metering, research facilities with specialized water systems, healthcare centers with strict compliance requirements, and hospitality-style housing where guest satisfaction matters. Their intelligent water management needs vary by building type across their portfolio.
The financial case varies by property type but often centers on risk prevention rather than operational savings. Undetected leaks accumulate costs through water waste, property damage, and insurance claims. Accurate sub-metering improves cost recovery in multifamily properties. Insurance premiums increasingly reflect water risk management practices.
More strategically, water represents the last major blind spot in building performance data. As ESG reporting requirements expand and sustainability metrics become more granular, water consumption and management will likely face the same scrutiny that energy systems already receive.
The most successful intelligent water management deployments often begin with a single, business-critical use case rather than a comprehensive system rollout. Consider the example that will be presented at NexusCon ‘25 by Adonis Woods from Hyatt Regency.
Woods identified hot shower delivery to guests as his facility's top operational priority. That simple starting point—ensuring reliable hot water delivery—provided a clear entry point for deploying intelligent water management tools. The problem was specific, measurable, and directly tied to customer satisfaction.
This approach offers a template for other building owners. Rather than attempting to monitor everything at once, identify your most pressing water-related risk:
Starting with a focused problem creates several advantages. It provides clear ROI metrics for the initial investment. It allows facility teams to learn the technology on a manageable scale. Most importantly, it demonstrates value to stakeholders who might be skeptical of broader digitization initiatives.
Matthies explains that most customers approach them reactively: "The biggest reason someone's coming to us, is either lack of visibility into their water systems or because something bad happens, and then they're looking for a solution that will help prevent that from recurring”.
From the initial deployment, solutions can expand as needs grow and confidence builds. The hotel that starts with domestic hot water monitoring often adds cooling tower oversight next, then leak detection in high-risk areas, then sub-metering for cost allocation. Each expansion builds on existing infrastructure and institutional knowledge.
Water may be called the "silent utility," but it can cause the loudest disruptions when systems fail. The market now offers practical tools to digitize and manage water systems, even for owners without existing building automation infrastructure.
The shift from reactive to proactive water management reflects broader changes in how building owners think about their assets. Energy management evolved from monthly utility bills to real-time optimization over the past decade. Water appears to be following a similar trajectory, compressed into a shorter timeframe.
For some building owners, digitizing water systems will remain optional. Small, simple buildings with minimal risk exposure may never justify the investment. But for hotels, multifamily properties, large commercial buildings, and facilities serving vulnerable populations, intelligent water management is quickly becoming as essential as fire safety systems.
The infrastructure layer is falling into place. Bluefield Research anticipates cumulative spending of $169.5 billion on digital water solutions in North America by 2033, driven by the need for increased efficiencies in asset and operations management. As these platforms mature, they create opportunities for integration with higher-level building management systems.
An added benefit: Once water data exists, it can flow into comprehensive data layer platforms, uniting water monitoring with HVAC and energy systems in a single operational view. This integration potential addresses one of the main concerns facility managers raise about adopting new monitoring systems—that they'll create additional complexity rather than reducing it.
The lesson from early adopters like the Hyatt Regency is clear: once you can see your water data, it changes how you operate. The visibility transforms water from an invisible utility into a managed building asset with measurable performance characteristics.
---
Rethinking HVAC Control: The Building Automation System Architectures of Tomorrow, Today
This past summer, a Legionella outbreak in Central Harlem killed seven people and sickened 114 others. The New York City Health Department identified the bacteria in 12 cooling towers across 10 buildings, including Harlem Hospital and a construction site for the city's new public health laboratory. While remediation efforts contained the outbreak, it serves as a stark reminder of how water systems—when left unmonitored—can become deadly.
Water failures can disrupt operations overnight—from a burst pipe cascading through tenant floors to unsafe hot water loops triggering health risks. Despite this, water remains the least digitized building system.
This article explores why water deserves attention now, how the marketplace is evolving, and what building owners should know about water management.
If you’ve been in a building's mechanical room lately, then the disparity is immediately clear. HVAC systems have dashboards, sensors, and control systems generating streams of data. Water systems? Usually just pipes, valves, and a monthly utility bill.
Brandon Matthies, Head of Product at Nexa (by Watts Water), describes a common scenario: “a leak starts on a Friday evening in a 70-story commercial building after tenants have left for the weekend. By Monday morning, water has cascaded down 20 floors, causing extensive damage that could have been prevented with early detection”.
This blind spot creates multiple risks operating in the dark:
Catastrophic leaks: A slow basement leak that goes unnoticed can cost tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, mold remediation, lost rental income, and increased insurance premiums. Insurance companies are taking notice—some now require leak detection systems as part of their underwriting criteria, while others offer premium credits for installing these systems.
Health and safety risks: The Harlem outbreak isn't an isolated case. Legionnaires' disease can be caused by plumbing systems where conditions are favorable for Legionella growth, such as cooling towers, hot water tanks, and evaporative condensers of large air-conditioning systems. Without continuous monitoring, building owners can't detect when water temperatures drift into dangerous zones.
Regulatory compliance: States are moving beyond recommendations. California now requires all new multifamily construction (two or more units) to include water submeters for each individual unit. Similar regulations are spreading to other states.
The fragmentation makes these problems worse. Irrigation, domestic hot water, cooling towers, and plumbing loops operate as separate systems, rarely connected or monitored holistically. Water monitoring can feel a bit like we’re back in 1999 with facility managers walking around with clipboards, manually reading gauges and taking notes—if they're monitoring anything at all.
The market is developing a different approach. Recognizing this widespread lack of water visibility, the market is developing a different approach. Instead of requiring owners to install a full building automation system before digitizing water metering, vendors are offering targeted, non-invasive sensors that can be installed directly on specific water systems. This creates a shortcut that lets owners get immediate visibility into their most pressing water risks without the cost and complexity of comprehensive building automation.
Matthies explains that “Nexa's approach is to work with any brand of equipment”. To monitor a domestic hot water loop, for example, they simply place temperature sensors before and after the equipment and in strategic points throughout the loop to gain visibility into system performance.
This represents a fundamental shift in how building owners can think about digitizing their operations. Rather than starting with a comprehensive BAS and adding water points later, they can begin with their highest-risk water systems and expand from there.
This approach also reveals gaps in traditional building system categories. Cooling towers for example, technically belong to HVAC systems but often aren't tracked well even when a BAS exists. Intelligent water management allows owners to capture this data independently, bridging gaps between traditional building system silos.
Intelligent water management transforms water from a utility bill line item into a managed building asset. The category encompasses three main approaches:
Protecting property against water risks: This includes leak detection systems that can automatically shut off water when problems arise, temperature monitoring to prevent Legionella growth, and pressure monitoring to detect system failures before they cause damage. As Maili Neverosky, who leads the commercial side of water metering company Metron, explains: "We provide one-minute-data on leak detection. Being able to have, almost to the minute, insight when you are getting an anomaly in your leak detection can save companies thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases."
Managing plumbing and hydronic systems: Non-invasive sensors for temperature, pressure, and flow can reveal how domestic hot water loops, hydronic heating systems, and cooling towers actually perform. This data integrates with equipment like boilers and digital mixing valves for enhanced control capabilities.
Water system sustainability: Whole-building and sub-metering water use helps identify waste in cooling towers, irrigation, and tenant consumption while providing data needed for increasingly common sustainability reporting requirements.
The technology exists today and costs have dropped significantly.
JT Sabine, Customer Success Manager at Nexa, describes a typical deployment: “typically within hours a customer's water systems can be outfitted with non-invasive temperature, pressure, flow, and leak sensors. For example, a couple of temperature sensors gives us full visibility into a domestic hot water loop. These can be installed by the facility engineer themselves, providing immediate visibility into water system performance.
This isn't theoretical technology requiring massive infrastructure investments. Most systems can be installed non-invasively, with sensors that clamp onto existing pipes and connect wirelessly to cloud platforms. The barriers that once made water monitoring prohibitively complex have largely disappeared.
The intelligent water management marketplace remains fragmented, with most vendors offering point solutions rather than comprehensive platforms. For example: irrigation controls, leak detection systems, sub-meters, and water quality testing—each solving one problem but missing the bigger picture, is the marketplace status-quo.
A smaller group of companies are beginning to connect these building blocks into more integrated approaches. Brandon Matthies explains Nexa's strategy: "We think of intelligent water management within a building as encompassing multiple building blocks—sensors to read existing building meters, flow metering for sub-metering throughout the facility, leak detection, water system monitoring, and direct equipment integration for control”.
Nexa positions itself as working across multiple categories simultaneously—metering, flow measurement, leak detection, plumbing loop monitoring, and equipment integration. Their goal is giving facility managers a unified view of how water systems perform across the entire building.
Metron emphasizes high-frequency metering and anomaly detection, with particular strength in verifying billing accuracy and benchmarking water use across property portfolios. "We have been collecting water data for over 30 years," says Neverosky. "So we understand how it flows, where it flows, that and the data piece is very important when you're looking at any property."
The result is a marketplace in transition. Many single-purpose solutions exist for specific problems, while a few players attempt to knit together a complete water management story.
This fragmentation creates both opportunities and challenges for building owners. On one hand, they can start with their most pressing need—whether that's leak detection, sub-metering, or equipment monitoring—without committing to a comprehensive platform. On the other hand, they risk creating new data silos that don't communicate with each other or with other building systems—though some vendors are addressing this concern. Metron, for example, offers WaterScope DataLink, a programmable software interface that allows their water consumption data to be pulled into other applications, reducing integration barriers.
Not every building owner needs intelligent water management with the same urgency. A small office building with basic restrooms faces different risks than a 40-story hotel or a multifamily complex with hundreds of units. But for certain property types, water digitization is shifting from optional to essential.
Hotels and hospitality properties face immediate guest satisfaction issues when water systems fail. "The biggest driver is whether guest rooms have the right water temperature and pressure. Then it typically is responding to a massive spike in their water bill without any visibility into why and do I have risk with scalding my guests,," explains Matthies. When hot water delivery fails in a hotel, guest complaints follow immediately—and those complaints directly impact revenue.
Multifamily housing presents compelling economics around tenant billing and portfolio benchmarking. Property managers can move from estimating water costs per unit to precisely measuring individual consumption. Matthies notes that Nexa continues expanding its platform capabilities to serve these properties.
Large commercial properties increasingly face insurance requirements that make leak detection systems mandatory rather than optional. For certain categories of business where the potential for property damage and business interruption losses is exceptionally high, some insurance carriers may not offer coverage unless water sensor systems are installed.
Healthcare facilities must navigate Legionella risk and compliance requirements. These facilities can't afford the liability exposure that comes with unmonitored water systems, particularly when serving vulnerable populations.
Educational institutions represent a unique case, as university campuses typically combine all of the above property types. A single campus might include dormitories requiring tenant-level sub-metering, research facilities with specialized water systems, healthcare centers with strict compliance requirements, and hospitality-style housing where guest satisfaction matters. Their intelligent water management needs vary by building type across their portfolio.
The financial case varies by property type but often centers on risk prevention rather than operational savings. Undetected leaks accumulate costs through water waste, property damage, and insurance claims. Accurate sub-metering improves cost recovery in multifamily properties. Insurance premiums increasingly reflect water risk management practices.
More strategically, water represents the last major blind spot in building performance data. As ESG reporting requirements expand and sustainability metrics become more granular, water consumption and management will likely face the same scrutiny that energy systems already receive.
The most successful intelligent water management deployments often begin with a single, business-critical use case rather than a comprehensive system rollout. Consider the example that will be presented at NexusCon ‘25 by Adonis Woods from Hyatt Regency.
Woods identified hot shower delivery to guests as his facility's top operational priority. That simple starting point—ensuring reliable hot water delivery—provided a clear entry point for deploying intelligent water management tools. The problem was specific, measurable, and directly tied to customer satisfaction.
This approach offers a template for other building owners. Rather than attempting to monitor everything at once, identify your most pressing water-related risk:
Starting with a focused problem creates several advantages. It provides clear ROI metrics for the initial investment. It allows facility teams to learn the technology on a manageable scale. Most importantly, it demonstrates value to stakeholders who might be skeptical of broader digitization initiatives.
Matthies explains that most customers approach them reactively: "The biggest reason someone's coming to us, is either lack of visibility into their water systems or because something bad happens, and then they're looking for a solution that will help prevent that from recurring”.
From the initial deployment, solutions can expand as needs grow and confidence builds. The hotel that starts with domestic hot water monitoring often adds cooling tower oversight next, then leak detection in high-risk areas, then sub-metering for cost allocation. Each expansion builds on existing infrastructure and institutional knowledge.
Water may be called the "silent utility," but it can cause the loudest disruptions when systems fail. The market now offers practical tools to digitize and manage water systems, even for owners without existing building automation infrastructure.
The shift from reactive to proactive water management reflects broader changes in how building owners think about their assets. Energy management evolved from monthly utility bills to real-time optimization over the past decade. Water appears to be following a similar trajectory, compressed into a shorter timeframe.
For some building owners, digitizing water systems will remain optional. Small, simple buildings with minimal risk exposure may never justify the investment. But for hotels, multifamily properties, large commercial buildings, and facilities serving vulnerable populations, intelligent water management is quickly becoming as essential as fire safety systems.
The infrastructure layer is falling into place. Bluefield Research anticipates cumulative spending of $169.5 billion on digital water solutions in North America by 2033, driven by the need for increased efficiencies in asset and operations management. As these platforms mature, they create opportunities for integration with higher-level building management systems.
An added benefit: Once water data exists, it can flow into comprehensive data layer platforms, uniting water monitoring with HVAC and energy systems in a single operational view. This integration potential addresses one of the main concerns facility managers raise about adopting new monitoring systems—that they'll create additional complexity rather than reducing it.
The lesson from early adopters like the Hyatt Regency is clear: once you can see your water data, it changes how you operate. The visibility transforms water from an invisible utility into a managed building asset with measurable performance characteristics.
---
Rethinking HVAC Control: The Building Automation System Architectures of Tomorrow, Today
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This is a great piece!
I agree.